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A section for all you budding etymologists where each week the origin of a word or phrase is investigated.
This week it is..... Power corrupts; absolute power
corrupts absolutely
Literal meaning.
Absolute monarchies are those in which all power is
given to or, as is more often the case, taken by, the
monarch. Examples of absolute power corrupting are
Roman emperors (who declared themselves gods)
and Napoleon Bonaparte (who declared himself an
emperor).
Mandell Creighton in 1887:
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts
absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”
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.
He didn’t invent the idea though; quotations very like it
had been uttered by several authors well before 1887.
Primary amongst them was another English politician
with no shortage of names - William Pitt the Elder, Earl
of Chatham and British Prime Minister from 1766 to
1778, who said something similar in a speech to the UK
House of Lords in 1770:
“Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those
who possess it”
Acton is likely to have taken his lead from the writings
of the French republican poet and politician, again a
generously titled individual - Alphonse Marie Louis de
Prat 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 text:
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, but we can be sure
that it wasn’t Lord Acton.
“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) (above). The historian and
moralist, who was otherwise known simply as Lord
Acton, expressed this opinion in a letter to Bishop
Is there an English phrase or saying that you would
like to know more about?
Email it to us on [email protected]
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