Most Americans admire the determination and drive of artists, athletes, and CEOs, but they seem to despise similar ambition in their elected officials. The structure of political representation and the separation of powers detailed in the United States Co

This history of success in the United States illustrates the degree to which personal and professional accomplishments have determined overall life satisfaction. Beyond serving as a guide to the past, present, and future of success in America, especially that found in the business world, this book poses a provocative argument: the standard practice of employing outer-directed measures of success, notably wealth, power, and fame, has worked to the psychological disadvantage of many Americans. More specifically, it shows that a comparative and competitive view of success has made a significant number of individuals feel less successful than if more inner-directed measures were used. Ironically then, the traditional model of success in the United States has been largely a failure. This work offers historians, practitioners, and general readers of non-fiction a blueprint for how to adopt a more meaningful and positive model of success in their everyday lives.

The provocative and acclaimed book that explains why America's politicians are continually disappointing. Americans' disappointment with politics and politicians will be a recurring theme in this election year, and Ehrenhalt's book will continue to be the touchstone for much of the debate.C.

Is “ambitious” a compliment? It depends: “[A] masterpiece of intellectual and cultural history.”—David Brion Davis, author of Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World From rags to riches, log house to White House, enslaved to liberator, ghetto to CEO, ambition fuels the American Dream. 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 of the introduction to the Declaration of Independence. Through an innovative array of sources and authors—Aquinas, Dante, Machiavelli, the Geneva Bible, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Thomas 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 reconstituting 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 upon the ends, the means, and the individual involved.

Sociologist, social critic, and political radical C. Wright Mills (1916-1962) was one of the leading public intellectuals in twentieth century America. Offering an important new understanding of Mills and the times in which he lived, Radical Ambition challenges the captivating caricature that has prevailed of him as a lone rebel critic of 1950s complacency. Instead, it places Mills within broader trends in American politics, thought, and culture. Indeed, Daniel Geary reveals that Mills shared key assumptions about American society even with those liberal intellectuals who were his primary opponents. The book also sets Mills firmly within the history of American sociology and traces his political trajectory from committed supporter of the Old Left labor movement to influential herald of an international New Left. More than just a biography, Radical Ambition illuminates the career of a brilliant thinker whose life and works illustrate both the promise and the dilemmas of left-wing social thought in the United States.

A groundbreaking new history of how the Vietnam War thwarted U.S. liberal ambitions in the developing world and at home in the 1960s At the start of the 1960s, John F. Kennedy and other American liberals expressed boundless optimism about the ability of the United States to promote democracy and development in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. With U.S. power, resources, and expertise, almost anything seemed possible in the countries of the Cold War’s “Third World”—developing, postcolonial nations unaligned with the United States or Soviet Union. Yet by the end of the decade, this vision lay in ruins. What happened? In The End of Ambition, Mark Atwood Lawrence offers a groundbreaking new history of America’s most consequential decade. He reveals how the Vietnam War, combined with dizzying social and political changes in the United States, led to a collapse of American liberal ambition in the Third World—and how this transformation was connected to shrinking aspirations back home in America. By the middle and late 1960s, democracy had given way to dictatorship in many Third World countries, while poverty and inequality remained pervasive. As America’s costly war in Vietnam dragged on and as the Kennedy years gave way to the administrations of Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon, America became increasingly risk averse and embraced a new policy of promoting mere stability in the Third World. Paying special attention to the U.S. relationships with Brazil, India, Iran, Indonesia, and southern Africa, The End of Ambition tells the story of this momentous change and of how international and U.S. events intertwined. The result is an original new perspective on a war that continues to haunt U.S. foreign policy today.

This history of success in the United States illustrates the degree to which personal and professional accomplishments have determined overall life satisfaction. Beyond serving as a guide to the past, present, and future of success in America, especially that found in the business world, this book poses a provocative argument: the standard practice of employing outer-directed measures of success, notably wealth, power, and fame, has worked to the psychological disadvantage of many Americans. More specifically, it shows that a comparative and competitive view of success has made a significant number of individuals feel less successful than if more inner-directed measures were used. Ironically then, the traditional model of success in the United States has been largely a failure. This work offers historians, practitioners, and general readers of non-fiction a blueprint for how to adopt a more meaningful and positive model of success in their everyday lives.