Harry Burrows Acton

Background

Harry Burrows Acton was born on June 2, 1908, in London, United Kingdom.

Education

Harry Burrows Acton studied at St. Olave's Grammar School. He also attended Magdalen College where he became a Demy in 1927 and a Senior Demy in 1930.

Career

Harry Burrows Acton started his career as an assistant lecturer in Philosophy at Swansea University College in 1931. He held this post until 1935 and in 1945 he became a professor of Philosophy at Bedford College. In 1964, Acton left Bedford College and took up the same post at the University of Edinburgh where he worked until 1974. He also worked as a professor at the University of Chicago and the London School of Economics. Acton also served as the Director of the Royal Institute of Philosophy from 1962 to 1964.

Harry Burrows Acton published his first book The Illusion of the Epoch in 1955. Later he wrote such books as What Marx really said, Kant's Moral Philosophy and The Morals of Markets and Related Essays. Acton also was an editor of Philosophy, the journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy from 1956 to 1972.

Achievements

• Harry Burrows Acton was an English philosopher, educator, and writer who was famous for his books about the morality of capitalism. His most famous books are The Morals of Markets and Related Essays and The Illusion of the Epoch.

Works

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• book

  • The Illusion of the Epoch

    (Written nearly fifty years ago, at a time when the world ...)

    1955
  • The Morals of Markets and Related Essays

    (Although the market economy is not as unpopular now as wh...)

    1971
  • What Marx Really Said 1967
  • Kant's Moral Philosophy 1970

Views

Harry Burrows Acton maintained that Marxism was ‘a philosophical farrago’, an inconsistent mixture of positivism and Hegelianism. He also attempted a moral defense of the principles of profit and competition in the free-market economy at a time when this view was intellectually unfashionable. Acton also endorsed a version of negative utilitarianism, according to which the reduction of suffering has unique moral importance.

Membership

Harry Burrows Acton was a member and president of the Aristotelian Society.

• Aristotelian Society , United Kingdom

  1952 - 1953

Interests

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Karl Popper, John Niemeyer Findlay, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Herbert Spencer

References

• Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Philosophers This Biographical Dictionary provides detailed accounts of the lives, works, influence and reception of thinkers from all the major philosophical schools and traditions of the twentieth-century. This unique volume covers the lives and careers of thinkers from all areas of philosophy – from analytic philosophy to Zen and from formal logic to aesthetics.
  1996