The Case for Greatness Honorable Ambition and Its Critics by Robert Faulkner
Yale, 288 pp., $30
It belongs to me more than others to rule. And I suppose that I am worthy of it.
So declares the young Alcibiades of Thucydides' history as he proposes to lead the greatest expedition of the Peloponnesian War. As Robert Faulkner's searching case for greatness brings to light, at the heart of political ambition abides not just the desire for honor but also a virtue that knows its own worth. We rightly view with ambivalence an Alcibiades whose ambition swept all else aside. But to understand political life, we have to comprehend ambition in all its forms, measuring each from the peak of the most honorable kind. Faulkner's book is an indispensable guide.
Prompted by the paucity of the contemporary perspective, and "the contrast between our experience and our theories," Faulkner reaches back to the classical thinkers--Aristotle, Plato, Thucydides, and Xenophon--for insight. Their sympathetic diagnoses of great ambition "illuminate our experiences . . . far better than the critical and doctrinal theorizing that is more familiar and has been in the works for three or four centuries."
Ambition is all around us, and its honorable form is a perennial possibility. Yet modern thought, which reduces human action to narrow self-interest, and contemporary social science, which emphasizes "rational maximizing, power seeking, self-interest, and popular voice," have narrowed the lens through which we observe the restless and elevated ambition of men such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, and Franklin Roosevelt. In his graceful and incisive analysis of this ambition, Faulkner places us in the company of great thinkers and great leaders, the better to understand them and ourselves.
He begins with the classical portrait of magnanimity or "greatness of soul," a peak of moral virtue in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. This portrait is the template by which we can comprehend every form of ambition, from the ordinary to the grand. Its delicate moral distinctions also make it possible to judge the overreaching of an Alcibiades against the restraint of a Washington. Aristotle's study of the virtue that pertains to great honor rescues ambition from the suspicion that, even in the best case, it is mere love of fame, desire for domination, or overweening pride.
In reviving an outlook that may be "foreign to our ears" but not our eyes, Faulkner traces the fine lines of the great soul: its devotion to nobility and justice; its self-knowledge, especially its awareness of its own virtue; its rightful claim to honor and disdain for all goods save virtue; its goodness as well as greatness.
"Aristotle does not mince words on this topic," Faulkner observes, "and neither should we. No greatness without goodness, yes, but also no true goodness without greatness." The great-souled are superior in virtue, and this superiority "claims for human excellence the prominence and tasks it deserves." No poor players strutting and fretting their hour upon the stage, these ambitious types are worthy of the highest honors and most demanding roles--worthy because they are both good and great.
Yet the great soul is complex; it harbors also deep tensions and dangers. While Aristotle's account of magnanimity is educative, trimming grand ambition with devotion to justice and philosophic equanimity, even the best education cannot always tame the love of honor and restless longing to act that move the great soul. Hence, in the next three chapters, Faulkner considers the Alcibiades of Thucydides' history and Plato's dialogues and the Cyrus of Xenophon's Education of Cyrus. These "souls of grand ambition" contain promise and perils worthy of careful study and reflection. Their grand ambition exhibits political virtue and rationality at its peak and its limit, and like the classical thinkers, Faulkner remains alive to the virtues of the great soul while also diagnosing its ills.
Taking these thinkers as his guide, Faulkner illuminates the complex psychology of ambitious men who long to rule over all. Political judgment about the capacities of such souls, as well as their ills and ignorance, requires a philosophic, and Socratic, education. Before the young Alcibiades, Socrates places a "radical mirror . . . the mirror of the knower." The reflection does not flatter the young man's hubris. He comes to see, for example, his contradictory dependence on the love of those over whom he would rule, his incoherent view of justice, and his fundamental lack of self-understanding. At the same time, he feels the depth of his concern for nobility and even his need for divine protection.
He is shaken by his discoveries. His virtue, as great as it may be, still needs a teacher. But the Socratic education ultimately fails to tame the ambitious Alcibiades. How and why it fails are central questions for Faulkner and must be for anyone who seeks to understand grand ambition in its brilliance and its shadows.
Such a picture emerges in Faulkner's nuanced discussion of Xenophon's Cyrus, the founder of the Persian empire, who is a mix of light and dark, gentlemanly wit and ruthless action. In Xenophon's hands, the legendary Cyrus, whom Plato's Alcibiades takes as his model, becomes the most rational of imperialists. The only ancient work Machiavelli mentions in his Prince, "the Education of Cyrus considers the political way of life at its most extreme and rational." But unlike Machiavelli, Xenophon does not "reduce truth to effective truth" or goodness to its appearance. As Faulkner argues, Xenophon's reader "can see and feel the cost as well as the benefit . . . the tragedy and the evil as well as the triumph" of imperial rule, even at its best or most rational.
Turning in his final chapters to the "sweeping modern skepticism" about the classical view, Faulkner pits -Douglass Adair's "Fame and the Founding Fathers" against John Marshall's Life of Washington, and then examines the influence of the egalitarianism of John Rawls and Hannah Arendt. These chapters show the consequence of a more superficial view of ambition. They also lead to key examples of the thought that has shaped this view: the critique of virtue in Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant's defense of equal dignity, and "the explosive Nietzschean reaction against both Hobbesian bourgeois security and Kantian idealistic equality." In a deft series of moves, Faulkner thus descends from the peak of Aristotle's great-souled man to Hobbes's vainglorious sons of pride and Friedrich Nietzsche's blond beast.
His last chapter is a cautionary tale. With Nietzsche, Faulkner observes, greatness of soul "comes storming back," but now it is all passion and will to power, absent reason and moderation. The challenge now is to look anew for true greatness and honorable ambition, "whether in examples such as a Washington or in the historians and philosophers who took seriously what is good and true as well as what is strong and great."
Ambition is all around us, but are goodness and greatness? Faulkner awakens his readers to what is at stake in this question, and our answer will take the political wit and philosophic insight so much on display in his compelling work.
Susan D. Collins, who teaches political science in the Honors College at the University of Houston, is the author, most recently, of Action and Contemplation: Studies in the Moral and Political Thought of Aristotle.