Jonah Goldberg has done some great political writing. I think some of his pieces on Lord Acton's "power corrupts" is probably one of the most significant of things he's written because people tend to take the wrong lessons from it than what Lord Acton intended (seeing that as a universal rather than the way people try to play favorites when it comes to political and historical figures and how they are judged).
Might vs. Right | National Review
THE REAL LORD ACTON
In 1887, in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton — a.k.a. Lord Acton — wrote, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”
Of all the truisms to be found in
Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, this one may be the most revered as sheer genius on college campuses, op-ed pages, and idiot-radio. Alas, it is usually aimed at rich, white, conservative men and few others, but that certainly doesn’t diminish the passion or frequency with which it is invoked. And, as is so often the case with people who replace thinking with clichés, the people who use it are invariably wrong.
Acton was actually referring to a tendency among historians to let their judgment of Great Men be clouded in the light of their accomplishments. Acton believed historians should make moral judgments about the men they study. The “power corrupts” line first appeared in a letter responding to a request for Acton to review a history of the Popes by Creighton. Acton didn’t like Creighton’s refusal to judge harshly the Reformation-era popes (a.k.a. “the bad popes”). Acton wrote:
I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favorable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holder of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. The inflexible integrity of the moral code is, to me, the secret of the authority, the dignity, the utility of history. If we may debase the currency for the sake of genius, or success, or rank, or reputation, we may debase it for the sake of a man’s influence, of his religion, of his party, of the good cause which prospers by his credit and suffers by his disgrace. Then history ceases to be a science, an arbiter of controversy, a guide of the wanderer, the upholder of that moral standard which the powers of earth, and religion itself, tend constantly to depress.