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Lectures on Modern History
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356 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1906
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About the author
John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
308 books65 followersJohn Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton, and usually referred to simply as Lord Acton, was an English historian.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
March 31, 2025
LOST IN A LANDSLIDE -
NO ESCAPE FROM REALITY!
Freddy Mercury
A FLASHBACK TO THE SIXTIES...
T.S. Eliot called Lord Acton a SUPREMELY SELF-conscious man. He KNEW HIMSELF - inside and out. So, Acton has much to teach us.
About Ourselves. And about our own Turbulent Times!
I remember taking this little book, in the Fontana paperback version, down to the strip mall at the end of our little majestically tree-lined suburban block back in the sixties, for the haircut which my father had sternly mandated for me.
I didn’t like haircuts back then.
Or the macho, leering barbers, surrounded by their turquoise hair tonic, clear glass containers of disinfectant-submerged black combs, and framed dusty glass pictures of Rocket Richard eulogizing Grecian Formula hair dye!
No.
And I had no taste for the easy banter of the good ole boys who sat around waiting their turn at the gossip mill.
So, in those days, I always took a good book with me in my travels.
But Lord Acton?
Surely you’re joking!
No, “I kid you not,” as Jack Parr, the in-crowd talk show host of choice in those days, used to say - before Mad Ave canned him for breaking down in tears when he was On The Air!
So what’s NOT to cry about, I thought?
And you see, in those days I already had a Pet Peeve with Mad Ave. Radix malorum est!
“Fleeing the short-haired mad executives,
The sad and useless faces around my home....”
That day, I chose the onerous, endless periodic sentences of Lord Acton to escape to.
He assured me in them that life has not always been chatty, uninterrupted infomercials - that there was once a solidity, a sense of value and purpose to it all.
He assured me with his contemporaneous compatriot Browning that:
“God’s in His heaven - and
All’s right with the world!”
But what I didn’t know back then was that Acton had had a deeply committed and Catholic idea of history as Conflictual that was essential to his view of History.
As a superficial, though benign critic of the author of the Wasteland, T.S. Eliot, would crankily say of Eliot’s cantankerous critical oeuvre - yes, I’m speaking of the words of Aldous Huxley - “It’s all so very much like a theatrical director setting a scene and barking orders, but never getting to the point of performing the actual play!”
Eliot, like Acton took a long time indeed to get to the point - because that point was a savage indictment of modern society. How do you say that archly yet politely (as Huxley would flippantly have us do)?
So “it was impossible to say what (he meant)!” The Enemy is so Protean...
And indeed Eliot was cast in the same conflictual and classical mold as Acton. And like Eliot, Acton never drew conclusions from his stertorous arguments.
He lets US do that.
His prose style as well as his reviews IS conflictual, and the conflict which was evident in his set-designing and marshalling of personas, which was at once form and content - classical by nature - is transparent.
Conflict is the nature of our lives themselves, as the great Heraklitos thundered in ancient days. We should remember that.
I myself could never forget, and always remembered my sempiternal conflict with modernity - on that day of my haircut.
But I didn’t act on it.
Until it was too late.
For it was a fact I was trying to forget. Just like James Joyce - trying to wake up from the nightmare of history, and thus be free of it. Good luck, kid!
Acton and Eliot, on the other hand, plunged right into the fray of it, sabres rattling!
So now, more than Fifty years later, I understand that the conflictual ‘plays’ those two ‘directors’ supervised were so much like Pirandello’s Characters in Search of an Author - for as Eliot says,
We had the experience
But missed its meaning.
The ‘we’, of course, being his readers! For we have leached meaning from the ground of Being.
I’d been giving up my ground for too long... and this round, I lost.
But much later, I also - like Arjuna in the Gita - plunged into the battle.
Because I finally saw the life-and-death, vital meaning of the ancient Agon - Conflict. Acton and Eliot had been right...
I sighed deeply beneath the falling strands of jet-black hair as the barber finished his work.
No, it’s not alright anymore, I said to myself, back there at the barber shop in the swan song of the Swinging Sixties. The Good Old Days were now dead and gone.
Tonight, I promised myself, I’ll read more of that new Vonnegut book (back in those great days when a new one used to appear, like a magical panacea to all my woes, each year!)... for I had to stand up for value in a valueless world.
No one else would.
If I could just manage to muster some strength amidst all my Disquiet!
For now the strands of my black hair were falling thick and fast over my Acton book, making it unreadable.
I blew the hair off Lord Acton and closed the book in my lap.
After I had paid the grinning barber my five bucks (and that included a tip back then) I walked back down the street the short distance to my parents’ house, and walked up the porch steps.
I sighed again.
It was once again time for the evening newspaper.. more of the hard, fast, inescapable Truth of the Absurd.
And so:
“Nodding wearily, as one would turn
To nod goodbye to la Rochefoucauld,
If the street were time and he at the end of the street,
I said, “Cousin Harriet -
Here is the Boston Evening Transcript!””
And you know what Vonnegut would say to that?
“So it goes... "
For that’s life - back then, and NOW.
NO ESCAPE FROM REALITY!
Freddy Mercury
A FLASHBACK TO THE SIXTIES...
T.S. Eliot called Lord Acton a SUPREMELY SELF-conscious man. He KNEW HIMSELF - inside and out. So, Acton has much to teach us.
About Ourselves. And about our own Turbulent Times!
I remember taking this little book, in the Fontana paperback version, down to the strip mall at the end of our little majestically tree-lined suburban block back in the sixties, for the haircut which my father had sternly mandated for me.
I didn’t like haircuts back then.
Or the macho, leering barbers, surrounded by their turquoise hair tonic, clear glass containers of disinfectant-submerged black combs, and framed dusty glass pictures of Rocket Richard eulogizing Grecian Formula hair dye!
No.
And I had no taste for the easy banter of the good ole boys who sat around waiting their turn at the gossip mill.
So, in those days, I always took a good book with me in my travels.
But Lord Acton?
Surely you’re joking!
No, “I kid you not,” as Jack Parr, the in-crowd talk show host of choice in those days, used to say - before Mad Ave canned him for breaking down in tears when he was On The Air!
So what’s NOT to cry about, I thought?
And you see, in those days I already had a Pet Peeve with Mad Ave. Radix malorum est!
“Fleeing the short-haired mad executives,
The sad and useless faces around my home....”
That day, I chose the onerous, endless periodic sentences of Lord Acton to escape to.
He assured me in them that life has not always been chatty, uninterrupted infomercials - that there was once a solidity, a sense of value and purpose to it all.
He assured me with his contemporaneous compatriot Browning that:
“God’s in His heaven - and
All’s right with the world!”
But what I didn’t know back then was that Acton had had a deeply committed and Catholic idea of history as Conflictual that was essential to his view of History.
As a superficial, though benign critic of the author of the Wasteland, T.S. Eliot, would crankily say of Eliot’s cantankerous critical oeuvre - yes, I’m speaking of the words of Aldous Huxley - “It’s all so very much like a theatrical director setting a scene and barking orders, but never getting to the point of performing the actual play!”
Eliot, like Acton took a long time indeed to get to the point - because that point was a savage indictment of modern society. How do you say that archly yet politely (as Huxley would flippantly have us do)?
So “it was impossible to say what (he meant)!” The Enemy is so Protean...
And indeed Eliot was cast in the same conflictual and classical mold as Acton. And like Eliot, Acton never drew conclusions from his stertorous arguments.
He lets US do that.
His prose style as well as his reviews IS conflictual, and the conflict which was evident in his set-designing and marshalling of personas, which was at once form and content - classical by nature - is transparent.
Conflict is the nature of our lives themselves, as the great Heraklitos thundered in ancient days. We should remember that.
I myself could never forget, and always remembered my sempiternal conflict with modernity - on that day of my haircut.
But I didn’t act on it.
Until it was too late.
For it was a fact I was trying to forget. Just like James Joyce - trying to wake up from the nightmare of history, and thus be free of it. Good luck, kid!
Acton and Eliot, on the other hand, plunged right into the fray of it, sabres rattling!
So now, more than Fifty years later, I understand that the conflictual ‘plays’ those two ‘directors’ supervised were so much like Pirandello’s Characters in Search of an Author - for as Eliot says,
We had the experience
But missed its meaning.
The ‘we’, of course, being his readers! For we have leached meaning from the ground of Being.
I’d been giving up my ground for too long... and this round, I lost.
But much later, I also - like Arjuna in the Gita - plunged into the battle.
Because I finally saw the life-and-death, vital meaning of the ancient Agon - Conflict. Acton and Eliot had been right...
I sighed deeply beneath the falling strands of jet-black hair as the barber finished his work.
No, it’s not alright anymore, I said to myself, back there at the barber shop in the swan song of the Swinging Sixties. The Good Old Days were now dead and gone.
Tonight, I promised myself, I’ll read more of that new Vonnegut book (back in those great days when a new one used to appear, like a magical panacea to all my woes, each year!)... for I had to stand up for value in a valueless world.
No one else would.
If I could just manage to muster some strength amidst all my Disquiet!
For now the strands of my black hair were falling thick and fast over my Acton book, making it unreadable.
I blew the hair off Lord Acton and closed the book in my lap.
After I had paid the grinning barber my five bucks (and that included a tip back then) I walked back down the street the short distance to my parents’ house, and walked up the porch steps.
I sighed again.
It was once again time for the evening newspaper.. more of the hard, fast, inescapable Truth of the Absurd.
And so:
“Nodding wearily, as one would turn
To nod goodbye to la Rochefoucauld,
If the street were time and he at the end of the street,
I said, “Cousin Harriet -
Here is the Boston Evening Transcript!””
And you know what Vonnegut would say to that?
“So it goes... "
For that’s life - back then, and NOW.
October 24, 2013
There is probably more good history in this book than you will find in all of the required history texts you had from sixth grade through college. Written for people who care about history that matters and not as a validation or condemnation of transient fads. Lord Acton was one of the last in line of a few centuries of great English and French historians who were truly in love with history, the likes of which are unfathomable anymore. Four hundred years of the development of the Western world should read like a great novel and in so few words, Acton wrote that novel. The five short pages at the end focusing on the American revolution really put the ridiculous and stubborn smallness of the British Empire in great perspective. A star removed for the meandering and dull introduction and the useless section of quotes, the majority in one of half a dozen foreign tongues.
July 3, 2016
A great summary of Acton's most interesting ideas on, for his time, recent events. Especially the part on Peter's Russia was extraordinary. Most of all, an interesting way to grasp the nineteenth-century idea of different concepts, like modern history, civilisation, liberty and Europe. Acton was a cosmopolitan, a Napels-born Englishman with Bavarian roots but most of all, a Catholic Briton. Acton was perhaps one of the most "European" Britons but his lectures also painfully examines that a Brexit was determined already a long time ago in British cultural thought. Acton has to explicitly express his Europeanness, thus admitting that it is not a self-evident character of an Englishman. An even Lord Acton, a man with much affection for the Continent, cannot help using language that implicitly seperates the Island from Europe: "When Europe did this and that, England did such", "This and that had a great influence on European philosophy, but as well for English thought", "While Europe was in this, England remained that", and so on. For many this might not be the most enlightening aspect of the book, but as for me it did make me realise that English euroscepticism is rooted in more than Syrian crises and the absence of WW2 victimhood.
May 16, 2022
Έμεινα πολύ ικανοποιημένος από το εν λόγω βιβλίο. Εύκολο στην ανάγνωση καλύπτει τα κυριότερα γεγονότα της περιόδου που αναφέρεται. Χωρίς πολλές λεπτομέρειες ίσως είναι ανεπαρκές για κάποιον που έχει εντρυφήσει στα θέματα αυτά αλλά με δεδομένο ότι η ελληνική εκπαίδευση δεν τα καλύπτει ουσιαστικά καθόλου, είναι μια όαση για τον αρχάριο. Αξίζει να σημειωθεί ότι δεν πρόκειται για σύγγραμμα του Λόρδου Άκτον αλλά το βιβλίο βασίζεται στις σημειώσεις από τις παραδόσεις του στα πανεπιστήμια που δίδασκε.
September 5, 2016
Lectures on Modern History is a series of lectures Lord Acton delivered as a history professor at Cambridge. Each one concentrates on a particular event, time period, or influential person in European history from the 1400's through the 1700's. Reading this book is like going to class to the kind of professor whose every sentence contains valuable information, insight, and how the ideas of the time period being discussed relates to events and people that came before and after, so that you can barely write notes fast enough to keep up with the lecture. Thorough and concise. How often are both those qualities to be met with in the same author?
The lectures are self contained, so you can read them out of order if you want to without feeling lost. Another good thing about this format is that the lectures are easily used as a quick reference of each era or person being discussed. Each lecture is only about 10 pages long, more or less. So if you are about to read another book discussing a particular era or person in more detail, or even a work of literature set or written in that era, you can use Lord Acton's lecture about that time to refresh your mind about key ideas, events, and people. That's the most likely use to which my copy will be put in the future.
The 19 lecture topics in order, are:
1. The Beginning of the Modern State
2. The New World
3. The Renaissance
4. Luther
5. The Counter-Reformation
6. Calvin & Henry VIII
7. Philip II, Mary Stuart, and Elizabeth
8. The Huguenots and the League
9. Henry IV & Richelieu
10. The 30 Years' War
11. The Puritan Revolution
12. The Rise of the Whigs
13. The English Revolution
14. Louis XIV
15. The War of Spanish Succession
16. The Hanoverian Settlement
17. Peter the Great and the Rise of Prussia
18. Frederick the Great
19. The American Revolution
Also included in the beginning is Lord Acton's Inaugural Lecture on the Study of History.
The lectures are self contained, so you can read them out of order if you want to without feeling lost. Another good thing about this format is that the lectures are easily used as a quick reference of each era or person being discussed. Each lecture is only about 10 pages long, more or less. So if you are about to read another book discussing a particular era or person in more detail, or even a work of literature set or written in that era, you can use Lord Acton's lecture about that time to refresh your mind about key ideas, events, and people. That's the most likely use to which my copy will be put in the future.
The 19 lecture topics in order, are:
1. The Beginning of the Modern State
2. The New World
3. The Renaissance
4. Luther
5. The Counter-Reformation
6. Calvin & Henry VIII
7. Philip II, Mary Stuart, and Elizabeth
8. The Huguenots and the League
9. Henry IV & Richelieu
10. The 30 Years' War
11. The Puritan Revolution
12. The Rise of the Whigs
13. The English Revolution
14. Louis XIV
15. The War of Spanish Succession
16. The Hanoverian Settlement
17. Peter the Great and the Rise of Prussia
18. Frederick the Great
19. The American Revolution
Also included in the beginning is Lord Acton's Inaugural Lecture on the Study of History.
July 19, 2012
Lord Acton's commentary on world history 1500-1785. Some very bright insights, but as many dubious ones. Whig History in both literal and pejorative senses of the term.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews