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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...