Lord Acton's Maxim: Power Tends to Corrupt ... (1)

Power tends to corrupt ...

In the grand whodunnit of public integrity, the KPK says our protagonist didn’t merely trip over a paperclip; he ran a toll gate on the nation’s safety certificates. The alleged scheme is painfully prosaic: take a basic K3 certification that ought to shuffle along for about Rp275,000, shove it into bureaucratic molasses, then “solve” the gridlock—for a tidy bite that ballooned to around Rp6 million per head. Imagine Oliver Twist running HR: “Please, sir, may I certify?”—“Certainly, boy, provided you contribute to the noble fund.” The haul reportedly scaled from workers being squeezed at the counter to rivers of cash sloshing through a coordinator charmingly nicknamed “the sultan,” with the KPK stating one official raked in a head-spinning Rp69 billion between 2019 and 2024. Our leading man, meanwhile, is accused of personally pocketing about Rp3 billion, which—quite coincidentally, I’m sure—coincided with a car collection that would make a Formula One team blush, including a Nissan GT-R and a sprinkle of Ducatis, all now lined up like contraband at show-and-tell in the KPK lobby. Curtain up, cuffs on.

As the plot thickened, the cast list grew: not just a lone wolf in a shiny suit, but an ensemble—eleven names by some counts—booked after an OTT on Wednesday night, 20 August 2025. The KPK’s press brief reads like a manual for rent-seeking: delay the files, tangle the forms, “lose” the application, then miraculously resurrect it once the envelope arrives. It’s governance by velvet rope: pay to enter, pay to breathe, pay to leave. And when the lights came up, critics outside the mainstream chorused two refrains at once: one camp thundering “clean house now,” the other muttering “mind you don’t turn the KPK into a political prop.” In short, the modus operandi looked less like public service and more like a subscription bundle—K3 Premium: ad-free approvals, with bonus motorcycle accessories.

By Friday, 22 August, the KPK named names, orange vests were modelled with all the grace of a walk of shame, and apologetic soundbites fluttered in the air like confetti at the wrong wedding. Through the hubbub, you could still hear the essential beat: a textbook gatekeeping racket, years in the making, executed with the finesse of a brick through a window. If Shakespeare wrote anti-corruption, this would be Macbeth with a motor pool.

The critics unleashed their critiques of the OTT (Operation Tangkap Tangan) scandal involving Deputy Labour Minister Immanuel Ebenezer (Noel) with a flourish befitting a scandal-ridden Downton Abbey. They wagged their tongues, tut-tutting at the absurdity of a man once proclaiming he'd rather lose his job than see textile workers laid off, now apparently lining his own pockets via alleged K3 (work-safety certification) extortion. The contrast was as dramatic as serving scones at a fire drill: utterly incongruous and steeped in irony—one moment, the champion of the people, the next, the very embodiment of what he vowed to oppose.

Labour voices, notably the head of the KSPI union, murmured their regret through clenched teeth, lamenting that even someone with a track record of advocating for workers can apparently be “tempted by wads of cash,” as though corruption were some irresistible trinket du jour. Their tone implied that this tawdry spectacle was less about Noel’s slip-up, and more a tragic emblem of systemic decay—like discovering your foreign-language teacher was selling fake diplomas behind your back. There was a sense of schadenfreude, too: a minister vocally decrying injustice, only to be ensnared in the very machinery he pretended to dismantle. Oh, the delicious irony! All critics seemed to agree: it was Shakespearean, performed on the grandest stage of national integrity—only with far less grace, and far more KPK.

Ah, splendid theatre, isn’t it? Here we have Mr Noel, parading about as if he were the crown’s own emissary, forever announcing that every deed of his was “in the name of the state”—a phrase he wields with the subtlety of a drunk town crier. Yet, behind the curtain, he is apparently hoarding motorbikes and cars like some post-colonial Lord of the Rings, except instead of rings he collects exhaust fumes. Critics, of course, are having a field day: the spectacle of a man who cloaks himself in the flag whilst seemingly living like a petrol-head baron is far too delicious to resist. And when whispers arise that perhaps these two-wheeled and four-wheeled trinkets were funded by more than just a ministerial pay cheque, one cannot help but imagine an entire shadowy subscription plan: “Pay your monthly setoran, and receive one free Vespa upgrade.” How Shakespeare would weep—and how Instagram reels rejoice.

Once a Termul, always a Termul—a universal law more reliable than gravity and just as merciless. Dress them in a Savile Row suit, hand them a Montblanc pen, and roll out the red carpet of officialdom, and yet, beneath the cufflinks and perfume, you will still find the same creature whose highest innovation is fermenting yesterday’s leftovers into tomorrow’s belacan. Critics may speak of reform, of “capacity building” and “institutional strengthening,” but it is a bit like training a pigeon to play the violin: highly amusing for spectators, but destined to end in feathers and noise. And so, the spectacle continues: the Termul struts about, gesturing as though running the nation, yet the only empire they truly command is a kitchen reeking of shrimp paste.

Indeed, Lord Acton’s immortal dictum, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” is almost too neat a frame for the saga of Deputy Labour Minister Noel. The first clause—power tends to corrupt—finds its tragicomic proof here: Noel’s office was not the highest throne in the land, merely a deputy seat in the labyrinth of bureaucracy. Yet even with this modest slice of authority, he allegedly converted regulatory responsibility into a toll booth for rent-seeking, squeezing workers for certificates that should have been a basic service. If such a limited position can already yield such mischief, one shudders to imagine what heights of venality could have been scaled had he ascended further.

The second clause—absolute power corrupts absolutely—serves as a grim warning. If a deputy, a mere custodian of paperwork, can allegedly turn his desk into a marketplace, then what becomes of those who sit at higher tables, with absolute discretion and armies of loyalists? Noel’s downfall thus reads less like an isolated scandal than a morality play, a foretaste of how even modest authority can corrode character, and how greater power, left unchecked, can devour a man whole. His case becomes not just a courtroom drama, but a parable of political entropy: corruption doesn’t suddenly appear at the summit—it begins in the foothills, where small powers rehearse for greater abuses.

Lord Acton never placed his famous maxim neatly between the covers of a grand philosophical tome; rather, it emerged in a private letter that later echoed around the world. In April 1887, he wrote to Bishop Mandell Creighton, chastising him for treating popes and kings too gently in his historical writings. There, with the ink of moral urgency, Acton penned the lines: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.” The phrase was not polished for a book, but born in correspondence—yet it escaped the desk drawer to become one of the most cited political aphorisms in English thought. It stands today not as the thesis of a volume, but as the haunting fragment of a letter that outlived its author’s more elaborate works.

Lord Acton (1834–1902) has long been hailed as the historian of liberty, a thinker whose intellect pierced beyond appearances to expose the unseen forces shaping civilisations. With a restless mind, he searched tirelessly for the anatomy of a truly free society, examining how the ideals of self-determination and liberty had been tested and twisted from ancient times down to his own troubled century. Yet, for all his brilliance and staggering output—essays, reviews, letters, and fragments by the hundreds—the grand book that might have gathered his lifelong vision of freedom was never written. Obsessed with knowledge, he devoured a book a day, but even such voracity could not keep pace with the torrent of publications of his era. Eventually, worn down by the impossibility of his task, Acton laid down his pen in despair. And so today, for all his immense legacy, he is remembered less for volumes of scholarship than for one thunderous line that has echoed across ages: Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Indeed, several scholarly works and historical studies have explored Lord Acton’s famous maxim on the corrupting nature of power. One of the most notable references is Power Tends To Corrupt: Lord Acton's Study of Liberty by Christopher Lazarski (2012, Northern Illinois University Press). Lazarski doesn’t elevate the maxim—“power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”—as a flashy slogan, but rather situates it within Acton’s deeply reasoned theory of liberty. Rather than focusing on the line alone, Lazarski reconstructs Acton’s vision of civic freedom by mining his essays, letters, lectures, and notes. He shows how Acton believed that true liberty emerges in self-governing communities and is endangered by centralised authority—precisely the kind of insight that gives context to the famous maxim.

In fact, Lazarski’s concluding chapter—titled Acton’s Legacy and Lessons—delivers the distilled practical implications of Acton’s philosophy, effectively offering a forum to understand how that enduring phrase fits into a coherent, far-reaching account of political liberty. Lazarski distils Lord Acton’s legacy into a powerful moral and political programme. First, he reaffirms Acton’s core belief: the law must not be the whims of a sovereign but the crystallisation of a nation’s conscience. The relentless hunger for power, Lazarski warns through Acton, remains forever entrenched as a threat to humanity. For Acton, liberty cannot flourish unless it is guarded by both a free Church and robust self-governing communities; without these checks, the overpowering state regains its oppressive nature.

Lazarski also underscores Acton’s method as an exemplar: he did not begin with abstract ideals but observed actual societies and built his theories from empirical reality—much like Aristotle. From this grounded approach, Acton concluded that freedom takes root in self-governing local communities and municipalities. A federal structure, where local and central powers balance one another, offered the most promising bulwark against arbitrary authority. Ultimately, Lazarski regards Acton as a prophet of civic liberty: his work teaches that the safeguarding of freedom depends not on grand rhetoric but on concrete, historical conditions and institutions that keep power restrained.

Additionally, Gertrude Himmelfarb’s Victorian Minds (1968, Knopf) dedicates a thoughtful discussion to Acton’s intellectual legacy, including his suspicion of concentrated power. Himmelfarb makes it clear that Victorian intellectuals, Lord Acton among them, were haunted by the spectre of unrestrained power. They saw in history repeated confirmation that the expansion of authority, whether by monarchs, parliaments, or bureaucracies, inevitably carried the seeds of corruption and tyranny. Acton, with his famous maxim, crystallised this anxiety into a principle: that the accumulation of power is not merely a danger to institutions but a profound threat to the moral fibre of individuals who wield it. Himmelfarb shows that the Victorians’ concern was not abstract but rooted in their close reading of history—Revolutionary France, the Napoleonic Empire, and even the gradual centralisation of the British state were lessons in the fragility of liberty under the weight of excessive authority. For them, the safeguard of freedom required vigilance, decentralisation, and a moral seriousness that refused to excuse wrongdoing in the name of political expediency. In this way, Acton and his contemporaries bequeathed a warning that remains strikingly relevant: power, if not checked, does not merely alter politics—it corrodes the conscience. 

Himmelfarb explains that the great intellectuals of the Victorian era, including Lord Acton, shared a deep suspicion of unchecked power. For them, authority without restraint was not simply a practical danger but a moral corruption that could infect the very soul of society. Acton’s famous maxim, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” became for Himmelfarb the distillation of this fear, but she shows that he was far from alone. Thinkers of that age consistently warned that the state, if left without limits, would devour both liberty and virtue. Their writings present a vision in which the balance between freedom and authority is the linchpin of a healthy civilisation, and where vigilance against tyranny is the citizen’s highest duty. Himmelfarb argues that this scepticism was not cynicism but rather a sober realism, born from history’s grim lessons of empires and rulers who, in their grasp for more power, destroyed the moral foundations they claimed to uphold.

Himmelfarb highlights how Victorian thinkers, including Lord Acton, developed a deep suspicion of unchecked authority, recognising that the concentration of power inevitably led to corruption and the erosion of liberty. For them, power was never a neutral instrument, but a force that carried within it the seeds of tyranny if left unrestrained. Acton’s famous warning—that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely—was not merely a rhetorical flourish, but the distilled wisdom of a generation that had seen how empires, governments, and institutions could disguise domination in the name of progress or morality. Himmelfarb shows that for these intellectuals, the true safeguard of civilisation lay not in the brilliance of rulers, but in the vigilance of society against the seductions of overreaching power.

Another essential work is Roland Hill’s Lord Acton (2000, Yale University Press), a biography that situates the maxim within Acton’s lifelong struggle to reconcile liberty, morality, and authority. Each of these texts positions the maxim not as a throwaway aphorism, but as a crystallisation of Acton’s deep fear that unchecked authority inevitably leads to tyranny and moral decay. In chapter seventeen, entitled “Power Tends to Corrupt...”, Roland Hill revisits the most famous maxim associated with Lord Acton, situating it not merely as a pithy phrase but as the culmination of his lifelong preoccupation with liberty and moral responsibility. Hill shows how Acton, wary of both monarchies and democracies, believed that power carried within it a constant temptation to overreach, a danger that no constitution or institution could entirely tame. Rather than trusting political arrangements, Acton urged a perpetual moral vigilance, insisting that rulers must be judged not by their successes but by their fidelity to justice and truth. Hill emphasises that Acton’s warning was not aimed at a single government or era, but was intended as a universal principle: wherever power accumulates without accountability, corruption of character inevitably follows. The chapter thus frames Acton’s words as both a distillation of Victorian anxieties about authority and a timeless cautionary lesson that remains hauntingly relevant.

Hill brings to life the very phrase that has come to define Acton’s intellectual legacy. Hill illustrates how Acton’s suspicion of unchecked authority was not simply a clever aphorism, but the distilled essence of decades of reflection on history, politics, and morality. He demonstrates how Acton applied this principle relentlessly, not only to tyrants and despots, but also to revered figures and institutions, arguing that no one — no matter how holy, learned, or powerful — could be exempt from moral scrutiny. The chapter underlines that Acton’s famous dictum was both a warning and a compass: a warning against the intoxication of power and a compass guiding the moral responsibility of citizens and leaders alike. Ultimately, Hill shows how Acton’s caution against the corruptive tendencies of power remains startlingly relevant, echoing across the centuries as a timeless critique of authority without accountability.

Now, let us embroider Lord Acton’s maxim with the colours of Javanese wisdom. The saying “Wong cilik nek nduwé kuwasa, dadi edan”—a common observation that “when a small man gains power, he often goes mad”—fits seamlessly into Noel’s tale. For here we see not a titan brought low, but a minor figure whose brief taste of office seems to have intoxicated him beyond measure. In his hands, a deputy’s desk became an empire of tolls, and a safety certificate, of all things, became a currency of extortion. The Englishman’s dictum and the Javanese proverb converge: power, however modest, is a dangerous elixir, and the smaller the vessel, the quicker it overflows.

One might also invoke “Sepi ing pamrih, rame ing gawe”—to be selfless in ambition and diligent in work—as the ideal which was inverted in Noel’s case. Instead of selflessness, there was self-enrichment; instead of diligence for the people, there was diligence in collecting envelopes. What Acton warned, and what Javanese sages repeated in a different tongue, is that corruption is not a thunderclap at the peak of authority, but a drizzle that begins at the first foothold of power. Noel’s fall, then, is less about the man himself than a cultural parable: the fusion of Western political wisdom and Javanese proverbs that together whisper the same truth—unchecked power, great or small, breeds ruin.

[Part 2]

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