Ambition a History: From Vice to Virtue

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 nations founding ambition was viewed as a dangerous vice sometimes described as a canker on the soul or the cause of Adams fall. This engaging book explores ambitions surprising transformation tracing attitudes from classical antiquity to early Modern Europe to the Anglo-American world and Americas 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.