(March is Women’s History Month. Acton will be highlighting a number of women who have contributed significantly to the issue of liberty during this month.)

What does the Victorian era have to do with contemporary culture and society? Quite a bit, in the mind and work of Gertrude Himmelfarb, an American historian who called her own work “the history of ideas.” Himmelfarb has been criticized for her call to the return of traditional values (like shame, personal responsibility and self-reliance) by an academic community that prefers what they believe is a “value-neutral” method of teaching and research.

courtesy of www.superscholar.org

Himmelfarb wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on the British parliamentarian and historian Lord Acton, which she later published as Lord Acton: A Study in Conscience and Politics (1952). Himmelfarb found Lord Acton’s ambivalent blend of liberalism and pessimism, ideas of progress, and notions of human sinfulness, as well as his advocacy of a “judicious mix of authority, tradition, and experience, to be highly relevant for the post World War II world.” Even in this early work, she discerned a connection between the modern neglect of personal moral character and the political catastrophes of the twentieth century, including the rise of fascism and totalitarianism.  (Gertrude Himmelfarb: Jewish Women’s Archive)

Read more on Women of Liberty: Gertrude Himmelfarb…

Michael Miller, a Research Fellow and Director of Media at the Acton Institute, will be participating in an economy panel discussion held on April 17^th at 7pm in the Wege Ballroom of Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Mich. The focus of the discussion will be economic freedom and the proper role of the state and the individual in creating and preserving conditions necessary for human flourishing and prosperity.

Read more on Event: Economic Freedom and the State…

Eric Teetsel, who runs the Values & Capitalism project over at AEI, invited me (among others) to pen some alternative endings to the Hunger Games trilogy. Eric is concerned that at the ending of the series, “Collins’s characters deteriorate into self-interested, cynical, vengeful creatures. The parallels of their behavior post-victory with the actions of their former dictators are made clear. Katniss even votes in support of another Hunger Games, this time featuring the children of the elites who have been overcome. It’s a Blue State ending to a Red State story.”

Read more on The Hunger Games: When Power Corrupts…

Looking through my back stacks of periodicals the other day I ran across a review in Books & Culture by David Bebbington, “Macaulay in the Dock,” of a recent biography of Thomas Babington Macaulay. The essay takes its point of departure in Lord Acton’s characterization of Macaulay as “one of the greatest of all writers and masters, although I think him utterly base, contemptible and odious.”

Read more on Lord Acton and the Power of the Historian…

David Lohmeyer turned up this excellent clip from the original Star Trek series:
Kirk opens the clip by referencing the Nazi “leader principle” (das Führerprinzip). Soon after Hitler’s election as chancellor in 1933, the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer gave a (partial) radio address and later lectured publicly on the topic of the “leader principle” and its meaning for the younger generation. These texts are important for a number of reasons, not least of which is that Bonhoeffer compares the office of “leader” to a kind of inherent law of life (or natural law) that determines whether or not the leader is actually meeting his responsibilities and obligations. Thus the leader is not beyond the law, as the Nazi version of the principle held.

Read more on Men Seeking Absolute Power…

There’s still time to register for tomorrow’s opening lecture of the 2011 Acton Lecture Series (click here to reserve your seat for Rev. Robert A. Sirico’s “Christian Poverty in the Age of Prosperity”), and while we’re anticipating the start of the 2011 series we’ll continue our blog recap of the 2010 series. Today, we highlight one of my favorite lectures from last year: Joseph Morris’ “Alinsky for Dummies: His Persistent Influence and Its Meaning for American Society and Politics.”

Read more on Acton Lecture Series 2010: Joseph Morris on Saul Alinsky…

News from the Acton Institute:

The Acton Institute for the Study of Religion & Liberty is joining forces with Refo500, a project that aims to bring international attention to the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. Leading up to the anniversary in 2017 of Martin Luther’s posting of his Ninety-Five Theses, Refo500 is engaging with a variety of partner organizations to promote the importance of the Reformation period and its relevance for today’s world.

Read more on Acton Institute Partners with Refo500…

Another election has come and gone, and once again the balance of power has significantly shifted in Washington, D.C. and statehouses across America.  Tuesday’s results are, I suppose, a win for fans of limited government, in that a Republican House of Representatives will make it more difficult for President Obama and his Democrat colleagues in the Congress to enact more of what has been a very statist agenda.  But even with the prospect of divided government on the horizon, we who believe in individual liberty and the principles of classical liberalism still have much to be concerned with.  Perhaps the primary concern is whether or not those Republicans who were swept into office—not due to any real love of the electorate for the Republican Party, but rather due to anxiety over the direction the Democrats have taken the country—will be able to hold to the principles of limited government and individual liberty that so many of them claimed to espouse during the campaign, or whether those principles will be abandoned in a mad pursuit of power.  Forefront in the mind of every lover of liberty should be Lord Acton’s famous maxim: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Read more on Video: Sirico on Christian Anthropology (and some thoughts on Election 2010)…