Acton and Kirk once shared a mentor, and whereas Acton abandoned him, Kirk remained true. The mentor was Edmund Burke. The early Acton was a Burkean in philosophy and sympathy. Revolutions were thus violently unnatural, acts almost of state-suicide. Here is a judgment not so much about states or revolutions as about history itself.
Tradition is given a kind of presumptive moral force.
He recused himself from moral judgment. Cause and effect, not right and wrong, became his central concern. It was the job of the historian to understand the past, not condemn or commend it. One might almost say he lapsed into absurdity, for to make the claim that the past may only be understood in terms of itself is to claim that the historian, and outsider, cannot understand it at all. The irony of this historicism, indeed its incoherence, is that it absolutised a vast number of relative experiences and called them History.