Ambition, Character, and Liberty

Ambition, in the classical sense, reveals itself in the character of the people around President Donald Trump. His second term is an opportune moment to look to the fall of the Roman Republic, when ambition and its corrosive effect on human character launched a civil war and doomed self-government. It’s worth doing so not merely as a matter of historical curiosity, but to draw lessons about the effect that such ambition and such characters are having on our own republican form of government. And, one hopes, to take action to preserve the American republic before it, too, is undone by ambition, lawlessness, and the lust for power.

An ambitious person, in the classical understanding, fixates on seeking the approval of others in the quest for power. Because that sensibility holds that the approbation of others is more important than self-respect, someone possessed by ambition in the classical sense sees few, if any, restraints on what he or she may do to win it. 

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and FBI Director Kash Patel are ambitious men. They’re ambitious in the classical meaning of the term. Their recent (March 24, 2026) competition to praise their boss gives us a sense of the classical meaning of ambition:

Stephen Miller: What president Trump has done on border security and public safety is a national miracle that will be studied not only for generations but for centuries to come. Thank you, president Trump.

Donald J. Trump: Thank you, Steve. So, Kash, see if you can top that. I don’t know. I don’t know. That’s a tough one, Kash. That is tough.

Kash Patel: I’m reminded that Americans exist to protect this country day in and day out and they’ve done it like we’ve done it here. But what we didn’t have was you. So while we’re out there fighting for the dreams of our children, just know, Mr. President, how many millions of dreams like mine are going to be lived thanks to your brilliant leadership. Mr. President, thanks for delivering America the safest country on God’s green earth. Thank you very much.

Readers of any political persuasion might recoil at such a blatant request for flattery, and at watching it be honored on camera. 

Ambition, Power, and Crime 

The word ambition in English has both positive and negative connotations, depending on whether one relies on the modern meaning or on the classical sense of the term, which has persisted alongside the modern one, and which still plays a role in how we think about human motivations and character. Ambition is derived from the Latin ambitio, itself derived from ambire, to go around. It referred to the practice in the Roman Republic of canvassing for votes, of walking around the Forum and asking people to support one’s candidacy for elected office—often, according to eyewitness testimonies, accompanied by the payment of bribes. (The related term ambitus emerged as an element of a criminal charge of illegal solicitation of support with inducements, such as money, meals, or gifts.) Ambition meant chasing after the approval of others, flattering or bribing them, or receiving flattery and bribes oneself. It undermined the norms of honesty, public service, dignity, lawfulness, and frank and direct speech. The word thus entered the English language freighted with negative baggage, with the connotation of seeking glory or recognition for oneself to the detriment of the public thing, the res publica. Even if not accompanied by illicit bribes, ambitio was demeaning and destructive both of character and of public good.

An ambitious person, in the classical understanding, is fixated on seeking the approval of others in the quest for power, and, because the approbation of others is more important than self-respect, someone possessed by ambition sees few, if any, restraints on what he or she may do to procure it. An ambitious person is scheming and ruthless. In William Shakespeare’s The Tragedie of Macbeth, Macbeth’s “vaulting ambition” for power leads to ever greater crimes and to ever greater corruption of Macbeth’s soul. As he acknowledges in his soliloquy,

The American founders shared that negative understanding of ambition. John Adams warned in 1772 that “Ambition is one of the more ungovernable passions of the human Heart. The Love of Power, is insatiable and uncontroulable.” In Federalist no. 6 [1787], Alexander Hamilton warned that “men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious.” George Washington, in his famous Farewell Address of 1796, warned of “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” who, he feared, “will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.” That is a warning that we would do well to heed today, as such ambitious and unprincipled men have swarmed over the executive branch of government. 

Ambition, Character, Strife, & Self-Government

Ambition thus understood is closely connected to bad character, to civil strife, and to tyranny. Ambition leads men to seek political gain through flattery of electors or those with concentrated power, power that necessarily comes at the expense of others. In effect, they must sacrifice their own souls and integrity to gain the favor of others, as Miller and Patel demonstrated when they fawned over Donald Trump.

If it were merely humiliating for them personally, it would not be a matter of public concern. Unfortunately, ambition brings down popular governments, whether we call them democracies or republics. Thucydides, in his book The History of the Peloponnesian War, diagnosed the root causes of civil strife (stasis) as “the desire for power, based on personal greed and ambition, and the consequent fanaticism of those competing for control.” “Personal greed and ambition” translate the Greek pleonektein philotimesthai, to have more of the love of honor, which the Romans later termed ambitio.

The horror of ambition became a staple of Roman political thought, and warnings against it played a role in the defenses of the republic by Cicero and Cato the Younger. Ambition, thus understood, was the enemy of popular government and of liberty. Cicero wrote extensively of the role of the desires—dangerous to self-government—for fame, glory, and power. In his final treatise, On Duties, he noted that “men are led most of all to being overwhelmed by forgetfulness of justice when they slip into desiring positions of command or honor or glory.” Ambition undid the republic that he and Cato sought to defend. 

Not long after the end of the republic, the Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus opened his Handbook, or Enchiridion, by stating that “Some things are within our power, while others are not.” We cannot control what happens in the world, but we can control what we do. In his teachings, he described on a personal, rather than a political, level the hollowness of the love of the honor of others, in Greek philotimia. A craving for the approval of others is a diversion from self-mastery, which is the only secure foundation of human flourishing. That’s a state known in Greek as eudaimonia, or maintaining one’s spirit in a good condition. Eudaimonia is an achievement that depends on our choices, whereas honors, recognition, and fame depend on the choices of others. “Eudaimonia” is rarely used outside of classics seminars, and it’s frequently translated into English as happiness. This may be misleading, as we’ll discuss below. 

Ambition in the Modern World

Like “happiness,” “ambition” is a word with a range of meanings. There is a sense—a modern sense—to the word ambition, one focused on meritorious achievements through production and exchange, through diligence and self-mastery, through the pursuit of knowledge and the creation of value. It’s not the recognition as such that matters here, but the meriting of that recognition. A pivotal figure in the emergence of the modern sense of ambition, as in so many other concepts of modernity, is Adam Smith. Smith focused on the importance of the awareness of meriting recognition, rather than on being recognized or lauded without any accompanying merit. We should seek, not merely to be approved, but to be worthy of approval: 

Thus, the “desire to become ourselves the objects of the like agreeable sentiments, and to be as amiable and as admirable as those whom we love and as admirable as those whom we love and admire the most” requires us to “become the impartial spectators of our own character and conduct.” 

Smith was well aware of the classical case against ambition. He also described in detail a different kind of ambition, one associated not with the search for power over others through control of the state, but with meritorious action. It’s a sense of ambition suitable to a commercial republic, which rests on the achievement of merit through the creation of value among freely cooperating persons, and on the cultivation of the liberal virtues suitable to civil societies. A person ambitious in this new and modern sense 

Smith’s treatment of ambition is complex and nuanced, as we can find in his discussion of “The poor man’s son, whom heaven in its anger has visited with ambition.” Such a man labors his whole life to serve the needs of others, creating and accumulating wealth, but he never finds the tranquility and repose he thought his efforts would bring. Even that person, who is visited by heaven with the ambition to become wealthy, and who works his whole life, does so by creating value and satisfaction for others, rather than by confiscating it or by using violence to dominate and humiliate enemies.

Smith distinguished the search for praise from the search for praiseworthiness. He and other thinkers of the Enlightenment pioneered a modern understanding of the relationship between ambition and character. Smith was well acquainted with the classical Stoic tradition, in which Cato the Younger and Cicero were steeped. The cultivation of character through self-mastery was connected to personal freedom, but also to the freedom of the republic. Smith observed that self-command is not merely a virtue, but the foundation of all the virtues: “Self-command is not only itself a great virtue, but from it all the other virtues seem to derive their principal lustre.”

The “ambition” of modernity seeks to be worthy of recognition through the creation of value, whether or not that recognition arrives in life. It rests ultimately on the cultivation of character. It takes work and dedication and probity and prudence and generosity and frankness, among other virtues. Those, as Smith notes, are generated under conditions of liberty far more easily than under conditions of tyranny, submission, or tutelage, which reward fawning ingratiation, rather than creativity, work, or self-discipline.

The classical sense of ambition entailed the degradation of character, whereas the modern, which is associated with honest business enterprise, with the arts and sciences, and with athletic and musical achievement, is rooted in the cultivation of the kind of character that the Greeks associated with eudaimonia: self-control, honesty, dignity. It is an ambition concerned primarily with honour, and not with honours.

Ancient ambition generates a character that lies and dissembles, that deceives others, that seeks their approval without actually benefiting them. It creates no shared value; it achieves no human excellence; it destroys or at best merely reallocates value rather than creating it. Modern ambition engages a range of authentic virtues in the search for praiseworthiness. It is civil, creative, peaceful, cooperative. Classical ambition persists, as witnessed by the groveling and slavish sycophancy of those appointed to power or seeking power under the present administration, but it is not the only outlet for the urge to improve one’s station in life. As state power expands, however, and as it is concentrated more and more in the hands of one person, authentic achievements that are praiseworthy are displaced by the toadying self-abasement of those who seek the approval of the despot and the largesse, perquisites, and sinecures that he can bestow upon them. 

Eudaimonia, or Enduring Flourishing

Ambition in the modern sense, but not in the ancient, is entwined with happiness, or flourishing—that is, with the ancient idea of eudaimonia. Eudaimonia plays a key role in both the virtue ethics of Aristotle and in modern liberal thinking. In Aristotle’s description, eudaimonia is an activity, an energeia, a term meaning “being in work” or “being in a deed.” We’ll come back to that in a moment.

Like “ambition,” the modern English word “happiness” has a dual meaning. That duality leads to a great deal of confusion when discussing happiness. It can mean a fleeting condition, such as being joyful or pleased, as when we ask “Does that make you happy?” But it’s also often used to translate eudaimonia, which is decidedly not reducible to a fleeting condition of joyfulness, or to any mere feeling. In the sense that “happiness” does mean eudaimonia, however, it played a role in the founding of the United States of America as a free and independent republic of free and independent citizens.

Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, wrote that eudaimonia is an “activity in conformity with virtue.” It’s not something that others give to us, and it’s not something that we just stumble into, for “it is better to be happy as a result of one’s own exertions than by the gift of fortune.” For happiness to be an activity, it must have its origin in us; we must be responsible for it, both in the causal sense, in the way that the wind is responsible for the toppling of a tree, and in the moral sense, in the sense that I am responsible for behaving honestly or dishonestly. The active exercise of our choice in accordance with virtue is integral to the moral growth of the individual, to the development of one’s character. The mere approval of others is not an essential ingredient in happiness, for, as Aristotle noted,

So eudaimonia is an activity, not a condition of being, such as being joyful or pleased or satisfied. That’s important in understanding the role of happiness in the American republic, which is redolent of eudaimonia. Two hundred fifty years ago, the American founders affirmed that “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” In addition to the universality of the claim for equal rights—a claim that is still in process of being made good—the term pursuit stands out. The signers of the Declaration of Independence did not believe that everyone has an unalienable right to happiness, but rather an unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness. Pursuit implies effort, work, striving, activity, energeia. “Happiness” in the Declaration is the realization of the modern ambition to create value and to receive merited approbation. That happiness isn’t possible without pursuit, that is, without activity. Activity is also how we build our characters, how we exercise the virtues and acquire the habits that make us better people, more capable of self-mastery and, accordingly, more likely to be good citizens of a free republic. 

Obsequious Flattery and the Corruption of Character 

In his Discourses, the Stoic Epictetus is depicted as advising a young man who was focused on his handsome appearance and his amazing hair, as young people are often wont to do. Epictetus told him to focus instead on his character: “For you yourself are neither flesh nor hair, but choice, and if you render that beautiful, then you yourself will be beautiful.” The beautiful soul, which is cultivated through choice, through doing, through experience, through learning, is more beautiful than the accident of physical appearance. It is also what free citizens in free republics cultivate. That is not to say that physical attributes, including cultivation of health and strength and even appearance, are unimportant, but they are not the foundations of good lives and, moreover, of good societies.

Why do we cringe when a powerful man demands praise from ambitious sycophants? Because we know that obsequious flattery cannot make the strongman beautiful or admirable. We cringe because we know that the demand and the unctuous fawning it requires are at odds with America’s highest ideals. Such individuals are alien to a free republic, which rests, not on unctuous fawning and servile prostration, but on the love of freedom and on the praiseworthy self-mastery and independence of men and women of character. 

In Aeschylus’s play The Persians, the oldest surviving play in western dramatic literature, and staged eight years after the catastrophic Persian defeat at the Battle of Salamis, the mother of Persian king Xerxes asks about the Greeks who have defeated the conquering slave armies of her son, “Who commands them? Who is shepherd of their host?” to which the chorus of Persian elders responds, “They are slaves to none, nor are they subject.” That was once said of Americans. Let us hope that it will be said again.