Robert Faulkner
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- October 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780300123937
- eISBN:
- 9780300150278
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300123937.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Political Philosophy
This book examines political ambition, good and bad, paying particular attention to honorable ambition. The book contends that too many modern accounts of leadership slight such things as ...
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This book examines political ambition, good and bad, paying particular attention to honorable ambition. The book contends that too many modern accounts of leadership slight such things as determination to excel, good judgment, justice, and a sense of honor—the very qualities that distinguish the truly great. And here it offers an attempt to recover “a reasonable understanding of excellence,” that which distinguishes a Franklin D. Roosevelt and a Lincoln from lesser leaders. The book finds the most telling diagnoses in antiquity and examines closely Aristotle's great-souled man, two accounts of the spectacular and dubious Athenian politician Alcibiades, and the life of the imperial conqueror Cyrus the Great. There results a complex and compelling picture of greatness and its problems. The book dissects military and imperial ambition, the art of leadership, and, in the later example of George Washington, ambition in the service of popular self-government. It also addresses modern indictments of even the best forms of political greatness, whether in the critical thinking of Hobbes, the idealism of Kant, the relativism and brutalism of Nietzsche, or the egalitarianism of Rawls and Arendt. It shows how modern philosophy came to doubt and indeed disdain even the best forms of ambition.Less
This book examines political ambition, good and bad, paying particular attention to honorable ambition. The book contends that too many modern accounts of leadership slight such things as determination to excel, good judgment, justice, and a sense of honor—the very qualities that distinguish the truly great. And here it offers an attempt to recover “a reasonable understanding of excellence,” that which distinguishes a Franklin D. Roosevelt and a Lincoln from lesser leaders. The book finds the most telling diagnoses in antiquity and examines closely Aristotle's great-souled man, two accounts of the spectacular and dubious Athenian politician Alcibiades, and the life of the imperial conqueror Cyrus the Great. There results a complex and compelling picture of greatness and its problems. The book dissects military and imperial ambition, the art of leadership, and, in the later example of George Washington, ambition in the service of popular self-government. It also addresses modern indictments of even the best forms of political greatness, whether in the critical thinking of Hobbes, the idealism of Kant, the relativism and brutalism of Nietzsche, or the egalitarianism of Rawls and Arendt. It shows how modern philosophy came to doubt and indeed disdain even the best forms of ambition.
