Ambition, A History
From Vice to Virtue
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
Is “ambitious” a compliment? It depends: “[A] masterpiece of intellectual and cultural history.”—David Brion Davis, author of Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World
From rags to riches, log house to White House, enslaved to liberator, ghetto to CEO, ambition fuels the American Dream. Yet at the time of the nation's founding, ambition was viewed as a dangerous vice, everything from “a canker on the soul” to the impetus for original sin. This engaging book explores ambition’s surprising transformation, tracing attitudes from classical antiquity to early modern Europe to the New World and America’s founding. From this broad historical perspective, William Casey King deepens our understanding of the American mythos and offers a striking reinterpretation of the introduction to the Declaration of Independence.
Through an innovative array of sources and authors—Aquinas, Dante, Machiavelli, the Geneva Bible, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Thomas Jefferson, and many others—King demonstrates that a transformed view of ambition became possible the moment Europe realized that Columbus had discovered not a new route but a new world. In addition the author argues that reconstituting ambition as a virtue was a necessary precondition of the American republic. The book suggests that even in the twenty-first century, ambition has never fully lost its ties to vice and continues to exhibit a dual nature—positive or negative depending upon the ends, the means, and the individual involved.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
American literature is rife with examples of individuals driven by a desire to reach beyond themselves to achieve some particular goal whether it is virtue, revenge, or self-knowledge. Ambition, however, wasn't always a central feature of American culture, and King, executive director of the Yale Center for Analytical Sciences, sets out to examine the ways that this trait, once considered a vice, has been so woven into the fabric of American identity. He traces the concept from the Greeks and Romans through early and medieval Christianity which viewed ambition as sin up though early modern England, when ambition continued to be viewed as sin but more openly acknowledged as a human desire in a world where exploration and conquest offered individuals the opportunity to search for prosperity. King's survey concludes by illustrating the ways in which the "American Revolution was among the most audaciously ambitious acts in the history of the Western world," both affirming ambition as a virtue and distancing itself from conceptions of ambition as sin or vice. Although his overview contains interesting passages, it reads like a dissertation and lacks careful editing; he hurries through ideas as if simply amassing examples is sufficient for making his point. King's book is ambitious on its own, but is stunted by repetition and lack of depth.
