Ambition: A History from Vice to Virtue.

• Author: Montanye, James A.
• Position: Book review

Ambition: A History from Vice to Virtue

By William Casey King

New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2013.

Pp. 248. $30.00 cloth.

Ambition is a human trait with a profoundly Dickensian character. It is the best of virtues and the worst of virtues. It is both denounced and praised by religious and secular authorities. It drives entrepreneurship, innovation, and economic growth but also causes the creative destruction of established economic and social orders. It fosters the rise of civilizations and propels their decline. And yet, as author William Casey King notes, historians have ignored the inflected path of ambition's transformation from ancient vice to modern virtue, an oversight that coincidently enables many distorted interpretations of economic and political history.

King's splendid book Ambition: A History from Vice to Virtue illuminates the management, manipulation, and literary exposition of ambition from antiquity through America's founding. The work explains, among other things, why Shakespeare's Marc Antony publicly dismissed rumors that Caesar was ambitious and how the Bard's tale of the Macbeths' vaulting ambition echoed the Geneva Bible's familiar exegesis of original sin; why the medieval church located ambition within the deadly sins of avarice and pride and why the prescribed remedy for ambition was "mediocritie"; why, in King's words, "[a]mbition was inveighed against in official Elizabethan homilies read by order of the state in pulpits throughout England; defined as 'the unlawful and restless desire in men to be of higher estate than God hath geven or appoynted unto them'; identified as one of the major causes of rebellion; and associated with Satan, madness, damnation, and sin" (p. 46); why the age of exploration caused both church and state suddenly to embrace ambition; how Francis Bacon's insight linking ambition with disease influenced James Madison's vision of a constitutional structure that would cause "ambition ... to counteract ambition"; why John Adams could write in 1777 that "[ajmbition in a Republic, is a great Virtue, for it is nothing more than a Desire, to Serve the Public, to promote the Happiness of the People, to increase the Wealth, the Grandeur, and Prosperity of the Community. This, [sic] Ambition is but another Name for public Virtue, and public Spirit" (qtd. on p. 187); and, finally, how ambition's excesses and limitations continue turning potential bliss into woe for millions of individuals...