Virtue and Vice in Academic Memory: Lord Acton and Charles Oman

Abstract

This article argues that notions of virtue and vice were central to scholarly debates about what it took to be a historian in Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century. Moreover, in an attempt at combining the study of academic memory cultures with the rapidly growing interest of historians in epistemic virtues and vices, this article aims to show that epistemic virtues are best studied in constellations, rather than in isolation. It does this through an analysis of how Lord Acton (1834–1902), one of Britain’s foremost historians, was remembered by his academic peers. Although Acton was highly esteemed by his contemporaries, he was at the same time regarded as being gravely unproductive, because he never wrote a single book. This perceived unproductivity became the focus of debates on how Acton was to be remembered. Acton’s biographers highlighted specific virtues and vices as characteristic of him, because they disagreed about what “good” scholarship was and, consequently, about the constellations of virtues that historians should ideally possess. Moreover, what was at stake in the memory culture around the person of Acton were not single virtues like “accuracy,” “thoroughness,” and “courage” but constellations in which each of these virtues had a relative weight. Virtues could turn into vices if they disturbed the balance of such an ideal-typical constellation.