Ambition, a History

From log house to White House, enslaved to liberator, ghetto to office of the CEO, ambition drives the American Dream. Americans are a nation of people driven by ambition. Yet at the time of the nation's founding, ambition was viewed as a dangerous vice, sometimes described as "a canker on the soul" or the cause of Adam's fall. This engaging book explores ambition's surprising transformation, tracing attitudes from classical antiquity to early Modern Europe to the Anglo-American world and America's formative days. From this broad historical perspective, William 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, among 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. Even so, ambition has never lost its ties to vice, and the book considers the dual nature of ambition in the twenty-first century, when the trait may be deemed positive or negative, depending upon the ends, the means, and the individual involved.