AMBITION, A HISTORY: FROM VICE TO VIRTUE by William Casey King
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Ambition, A History: From Vice to Virtue by William Casey King
From rags to riches, log house to White House, enslaved to liberator, ghetto to CEO, ambition fuels the American Dream. Americans are driven by ambition. 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 to the introduction to the Declaration of Independence.
Through an innovative array of sources and authors -- Aquinas, Dante, Machiavelli, the Geneva Bible, Marlowe, Shakespeare, 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 reconstitution 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 on the ends, the means, and the individual involved.
Yale University Press, Hardcover, 1st Edition, 1st Printing, 2013
This is a BRAND NEW book.
From rags to riches, log house to White House, enslaved to liberator, ghetto to CEO, ambition fuels the American Dream. Americans are driven by ambition. 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 to the introduction to the Declaration of Independence.
Through an innovative array of sources and authors -- Aquinas, Dante, Machiavelli, the Geneva Bible, Marlowe, Shakespeare, 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 reconstitution 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 on the ends, the means, and the individual involved.
Yale University Press, Hardcover, 1st Edition, 1st Printing, 2013
This is a BRAND NEW book.
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