Lectures on Modern History

The two volumes of his lectures on modern history and on the French Revolution give us in their full ripeness the sum of Acton's historical judgments. History was not to Acton a mere academic pursuit. With that view of history which considers it, beneath the dry light of science, as a series of phenomena capable of detachment from the present, susceptible to separate analysis, he had no sympathy. Still less did he consider history a mere form of literary exposition. The one justification fo...