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"A stunning exploration of ambition that brings together literary, philosophical, psychological, and sociological perspectives on this most human of passions. Drawing on a long and varied tradition of writing on this topic, from authors and thinkers that range from Hesiod to Kafka and from Shakespeare to Freud, and from a history that moves from ancient Greece and Rome via Italian Renaissance to modernity, Eckart Goebel explores our driving passion for recognition-an insatiable hunter in the mirror-and power"--
List of contents
IntroductionI. Semantics of Ambition
II. Eris - Agon - Ambition
III. Ambition in Modernity
1. A New Era of Ambition (Jacob Burckhardt)
2. The Ambition of Equals (Alexis de Tocqueville)
3. Critique of Success (Gustav Ichheiser)
4. Critique of Contemplation (Karl Mannheim)
5. The Ambitious Spoilsport (Roger Caillois)
6. Hesiod's Return in the Achieving Society (David McClelland)
7. Burning Ambition (Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler)
The Ambition to Reject Ambition: An Afterword with a View to Montaigne
Index
About the author
Eckart Goebel is Professor of German and Comparative Literature, University of Tübingen, Germany. He is the author of Konstellation und Existenz. Kritik der Geschichte um 1930: Studien zu Heidegger, Benjamin, Jahnn und Musil (1996), Am Ufer der zweiten Welt. Jean Pauls "Poetische Landschaftsmalerei" (1999), Der engagierte Solitär. Die Gewinnung des Begriffs Einsamkeit aus der Phänomenologie der Liebe im Frühwerk Jean-Paul Sartres (2001), Charis und Charisma. Grazie und Gewalt von Winckelmann bis Heidegger (2006) and Jenseits des Unbehagens. Sublimierung von Goethe bis Lacan (2009). He serves on the Editorial Board of Oxford German Studies.James C. Wagner, Ph.D., is a lecturer in the Department of German at New York University, USA.
Summary
We describe people who are “consumed” or “devoured” by ambition as if by a predator or an out-of-control inferno.
Thinkers since deepest antiquity have raised these questions, approaching the subject of ambition with ambivalence and often trepidation—as when the ancient Greek poet Hesiod proposed a differentiation between the good and the bad goddess Eris. Indeed, ambition as a longing for immortal fame seems to be one of the unique hallmarks of the human species. While philosophy has touched only occasionally on the problem of burning ambition, sociology, psychoanalysis, and world literature have provided rich and more revealing descriptions and examples of its shaping role in human history.
Drawing on a long and varied tradition of writing on this topic, ranging from the works of Homer through Shakespeare, Freud, and Kafka and from the history of ancient Greece and Rome to the Italian Renaissance and up to the present day (to modernity and the current neoliberal era), Eckart Goebel explores our driving passion for recognition — that insatiable hunter in the mirror — and power.
Additional text
Eckart Goebel’s Ambition is a tour de force, tracking the complex and circuitous history of the concept through a series of profound analyses and offering inspired and provocative reflections of what has driven, haunted, and debilitated individuals and societies across the millennia.
