Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely means that holding power wears away a person’s moral sense, and holding unlimited power wears it away completely. Lord Acton wrote it in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887; his own wording was “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” He was not the first to have the thought, and he had reached for a rougher version of it himself ten years earlier.
Origin - the short version
“Absolute power corrupts absolutely” is the best known quotation of the 19th century British politician Lord Acton. He borrowed the idea from several other writers who had previously expressed the same thought in different words.
Origin - the full story
Absolute monarchies are those in which all power is given to or, as is more often the case, taken by, the monarch. Examples of monarchs who corrupted their power include Roman emperors, who declared themselves gods, and Napoleon Bonaparte, who declared himself an emperor.
Lord Acton - the origin of
’Absolute power corrupts absolutely’
“Absolute power corrupts absolutely” arose as part of a quotation by the expansively named and impressively hirsute John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, first Baron Acton (1834 - 1902). The historian and moralist, who was otherwise known simply as Lord Acton, expressed this opinion in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887:
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”
The saying “Absolute power corrupts absolutely” was coined by the English historian Lord Acton in 1887.
The letter itself stayed unpublished until 1907, when Acton’s Historical Essays and Studies printed an appendix of extracts that Creighton’s widow had made available. The editors introduce them as extracts from Acton’s letters to Creighton “on the subject of the article on vols. iii. and iv. of the History of the Papacy contributed by Acton to the English Historical Review”. Acton had reviewed Creighton’s book for that journal and thought it far too gentle with the popes of the Inquisition; the quarrel that followed was about whether a historian should judge a pope or a king by the same standard as anyone else. Acton’s answer was that he should, and the famous sentence is the hinge of that argument rather than a stray epigram.
It is also usually cut short. In Historical Essays and Studies the passage runs on: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.”
Acton had been circling the idea for a decade. On 26 February 1877 he gave an address to the Bridgnorth Institution at the Agricultural Hall, later printed as the opening essay of The History of Freedom and Other Essays, in which he described the unlimited power that ruined democratic Athens as the thing “which corrodes the conscience, hardens the heart, and confounds the understanding of monarchs”. That is the same judgement, in a much heavier sentence. What the 1887 letter added was the wording.
The text is a favourite of collectors of quotations and is always included in anthologies. If you are looking for the exact “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” wording, then Acton is your man.
Although Acton coined the phrase, he didn’t invent the idea. Something similar had been said by another English politician with no shortage of names - William Pitt the Elder, Earl of Chatham. Pitt said this in a speech in 1770:
“Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it”
_
‘Absolute power…’ is one of the language’s best known proverbs.
_
Pitt was speaking in the House of Lords on 9 January 1770, replying to Lord Mansfield in the debate on the case of John Wilkes, the member who had been repeatedly barred from the House of Commons after winning his seat. His sentence, like Acton’s, is normally quoted only as far as its first clause. It ends: “and this I know, my Lords, that where law ends, tyranny begins!”
Acton is likely to have taken his lead from the writings of the French republican poet and politician Alphonse de Lamartine. An English translation of Lamartine’s essay France and England: a Vision of the Future was published in London in 1848 and included this:
It is not only the slave or serf who is ameliorated in becoming free. The master himself did not gain less in every point of view, for absolute power corrupts the best natures.
Whether it is Lamartine or his anonymous English translator who can claim to have coined ‘absolute power corrupts’ we can’t be sure. What we can be sure about is that it came before Lord Acton’s more famous version. Whether Acton was aware of Lamartine’s essay we can’t now tell.
Conclusion
“Absolute power corrupts absolutely” is one of the proverbial sayings that seems to be proved correct by experience of people’s actual behaviour.
It was coined by the English nobleman Lord Acton in 1887, using similar ideas expressed by several of his contemporaries.
See also: Quotations.