Icarus unbound: The problem of ambition in Anglo-American culture.

摘要

"Men are qualified for civil liberty," wrote Edmund Burke, "in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains on their own appetites." Historians have spent considerable energy untangling the "moral chains" of political thought throughout the origins and evolution of the American republic. But recognizing and understanding a society's perception of vice, or sin can be as illuminating as comprehending its notion of virtue. This point was made clear by historian David Brion Davis, articulated as one of the central tenets of his Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. Professor Davis wrote, "[M]en could not fully perceive the moral contradictions of slavery until a major religious transformation had changed their ideas of sin and spiritual freedom. "Despite David Brion Davis's emphasis on this profound cultural and religious shift, relatively little scholarly attention has focused on untangling the divergent strains of sin, its specific definition and subsequent recasting. The purpose of this dissertation is to consider "ambition" in the context of Professor Davis's argument;From rags to riches, enslaved to liberator, log house to White House, ghetto to C.E.O., ambition drives the American dream. This is, of course, provided that the means and ends conform to a carefully circumscribed notion of what it means to dream and to whom certain dreams are allowed. But in much of the early modem Atlantic world ambition was considered a pernicious and dangerous vice, everything from a cause of madness to an impetus to original sin. It was described as a canker of the soul, an hidden plague ... a secret poison, the father of livor [envy], and mother of hypocricy, the moth of holiness, and cause of madness.";This dissertation seeks to explain how ambition, once a sin, was transformed into a problematic American virtue. While historians and literary critics have generally situated the celebration of ambition in the nineteenth century, this work looks at revolutions before the Revolution, and celebrations of self made men a hundred years before the birth of Benjamin Franklin.