Weiner, Greg

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Digital Commons @ Assumption University Political Science Department Faculty Works Political Science Department 2015 Review of Ambition in America: Political Power and the Collapse of Citizenship by Jeffrey A. Becker Greg Weiner Assumption College, gs.weiner@assumption.edu Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.assumption.edu/political-science-faculty  Part of the Political Science Commons Recommended Citation Weiner, G. (2015). Review of Ambition in America: Political Power and the Collapse of Citizenship by Jeffrey A. Becker. American Political Thought 4(4): 678-681. https://doi.org/10.1086/683234 This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the Political Science Department at Digital Commons @ Assumption University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Political Science Department Faculty Works by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Assumption University. For more information, please contact digitalcommons@assumption.edu. Jeffrey A. Becker. Ambition in America: Political Power and the Collapseof Citizenship. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014. Pp. xi+196.$34.00.This engaging and provocative volume examines a precarious phenomenonfor republics: citizens’ ambition to rule, which Jeffrey A. Becker argues posesinherent challenges to democratic equality yet is also “a necessary feature ofdemocratic politics” (xi). Becker’s interest is not merely the ambition of rulersbut the ambition of citizens for society. This is an ambitious topic, and thisbook, while raising important questions, does not address them satisfactorily.Its freely alternating perspective between the ambitions of rulers and thoseof citizens creates conceptual confusions, while its substantive treatment oftopics like The Federalist is frequently cursory and questionable, conducted ata step of remove through commentary on or quotations of secondary litera-ture rather than direct engagement with the subject matter under consider-ation.The essential problem that preoccupies Becker is how the regime can cul-tivate what he calls “healthy” forms of ambition, “where citizens seek publicoffice because they revere the norms of democratic government” (8), a taskcomplicated by Americans’ ambivalence on the subject. Some ambition, henotes, is necessary, yet Americans have come to regard public ambition asantidemocratically elitist at the same time that they have “become disillu-sioned by democratic practices[, seeing] their civic principles as hollow or stag-nant because of corruption,” the result of which is inflated and unattainableexpectations for politics: “Citizens’ ambitions outstrip their politics’ ability to678 • American Political Thought • Fall 2015satisfy those ambitions” (10–11). The apparent thesis—somewhat obscured,again, by this alternation between citizens’ and leaders’ aspirations—is thatcitizens need healthy ambition in order to identify and cultivate leaders withhealthy ambition.Becker finds early American forms as expressed in both Puritanism and TheFederalist wanting in this regard. He characterizes the Puritans as holding“shared ambitions for moral perfection” (20). Their “experience shows thedanger posed to democracy when people assume they can infallibly divideone another into exclusive groups based on those who do and those who donot belong to a moral community” (21). All this is based on an unsatisfyingtreatment of John Winthrop’s “A Modell of Christian Charity”—an odd be-ginning point, since the Mayflower Compact would have supplied a more ex-plicit and temporally prior model of self-government—in which Becker quotesonly a few sentences of the original and far more of commentary on it. Giventhis cursory treatment, the precise contours of Becker’s objection to Winthropare unclear. He characterizes the Puritan leader as believing that “governingauthority was not morally neutral. To unite people in the redeeming undertak-ing of building a moral community means that people must give their loyaltyand devotion to some principles rather than others” (23). But surely this is trueof any coherent community. Becker seems to believe the Puritans simply wenttoo far, obliterating natural shades of moral gray in favor of rigid and exclu-sionary distinctions. What is unclear, though, is why this is attributable at atheoretical level to the moral distinctions he identifies in Winthrop.Becker characterizes The Federalist as suspicious of ambition and, indeed,neglectful of the cultivation of the ambition that a republic needs. Underlying thisanalysis is the Anti-Federalist refrain, synthesized by Wilson Carey McWilliams,that Publius’s regime is inattentive to the higher goods of politics. The FederalistBecker argues, “expresses a hostility toward political leadership that precludesthe development of forums for educating citizens’ ambitions, a hostility Ameri-can suspicion of power and authority sustains” (45). Similarly, The Federalist“institutionalizes a political climate inherently hostile to forms of leadershipthat might deviate from the ‘will of the people’” (55). But there are multipleproblems with this analysis. One is that, in the passage from Federalist 10 towhich Becker is elsewhere attentive but does not reconcile with his claim here,Publius does assign representatives a central role in “refin[ing] and enlarg[ing]the public views.” The papers on the Senate and the presidency (62, 63, 68, etc.)similarly talk about leadership. Second is that the national government wasnever intended to be a comprehensive politeia. It was rather established forspecific purposes, with the bulk of political community remaining at the stateand local levels. The system can perhaps be faulted for this, but within its self-understanding, it is not deficient for failing to provide all elements of politi-Book Reviews • 679cal health by the hand of the state. Not all of them are necessary for theexplicit purposes of the national government, and not all of them are absentsimply because the national government has not provided them. Finally,Becker seems to channel Anti-Federalists but provides no substantive foun-dation for his assertion, which Madison explicitly disclaims, that “The Fed-eralist remakes the political community at the national level” such that “citi-zens no longer look to their state governments as the locus of ambition forpolitical power; the new constitutional order assumes that position” (54).Here again, the engagement with the text under consideration occurs largelyat arm’s length via either generalized assertions or quotation of the commentar-ies of others, so it is difficult to assess Becker’s textual basis for such questionableclaims as that “The Federalist structures the republic so the institutions of gov-ernment control the dangers of faction” (42). In fact Federalist 10 supplies nosuch structure and discusses no such institutions. It merely observes that the em-pirical conditions of an extensive republic naturally inhibit majority factions.Elsewhere, Becker attributes to Madison the view “that Americans concernthemselves only with success and not the lofty ambitions that would elevatehumanity” (51). Perhaps Madison holds this view, but it would be easier toevaluate whether he does were the claim linked to a specific textual citationrather than merely asserted.Becker’s chapter on the attractions but ultimate pitfalls of Jacksonian de-mocracy is more successful but still suffers from the impulse toward ques-tionable generalization, as in the following claim contrasting a competitiveand therefore apparently antipolitical commercial economy with a communalagricultural one: “In a commercial society, some people profit because otherslose or do not profit” (68). Similarly, such sweeping and hardly self-evidentclaims as the following synopsis of democracy beg for more analysis: “Evenas the ambition to get ahead materially appeared further and further out ofreach, citizens drew self-respect from working together to resolve commonproblems rather than appealing to charity. These are the core democraticideals of self-government” (70).This is one conception of democratic ideals—perhaps defensible even if un-defended here—and it helps to explain Becker’s curious, intriguing but ul-timately unconvincing appeal to Franklin Roosevelt as a Tocquevillian modelof healthy democratic ambition. This chapter moves seamlessly and sometimesconfusingly between the aristocratic ambition of Roosevelt and the populistambition of his constituents. An instance of the latter is Becker’s claim that “forTocqueville, local political associations could inspire, cultivate, and offer a fo-rum for expressing those—formerly aristocratic—ambitions for greatness” (80).This is not quite Tocqueville’s argument about association, which he felt couldcombat individualism but which he did not explicitly associate with greatness.680 • American Political Thought • Fall 2015The larger conceptual problem, which Becker acknowledges but does notadequately treat, is that Roosevelt the great centralizer can hardly be seen asthe archetype of a Tocquevillian statesman. Becker nods toward this difficultya handful of times, then grants it a three-page section that never really resolvesthe problem except to claim, rehabilitatively, that Roosevelt “sought to com-bine politics with administration; he did not—like many progressives—dismissthe give-and-take of political debate in favor of the ‘scientific management’ ofthe public’s business” (98). Yet Roosevelt had said even as a candidate, in hisCommonwealth Club Address: “I want to speak not of politics but of gov-ernment.”The title of the chapter that includes Becker’s commentary on Roosevelt is“The Ambition to Recover Democratic Excellence.” But it is unclear whoseexcellence Becker means. The democratic ambition of which he seems to speakis that of participation and the taming of corporate power: all fair enough, butit is not evident that this is related to excellence, which requires not thechallenge of others but the challenge of oneself. Becker’s concluding chapters,which take citizens to task for failing to do precisely that, succeed better. Ourmistrust of ambition has, for example, caused us to adopt “a selection system[for candidates] that often filters out all but the most ambitious candidates,whose ambition is often loosely connected to established political practicesand associations” (103). We select candidates who present themselves as aboveparty and compromise, morally pure, and ideologically strident. “The successthat accrues to individual political ambition in America teaches a dangerouslesson for democratic politics: that the individual can get ahead politically byusing other citizens instrumentally to achieve personal ambitions” (131).Becker closes with important observations about the hunger for and costs ofcult-of-personality politics. “Citizens who develop more of a personal iden-tification with presidential candidates and their administrations see the pres-ident as relieving them of their own responsibility for self-government” (147).One only wishes the incisive reflections with which the book is capped had beenplaced atop a sturdier edifice.Greg Weiner, Assumption CollegeBook Reviews • 681

Review of \u3cem\u3eAmbition in America: Political Power and the Collapse of Citizenship\u3c/em\u3e by Jeffrey A. Becker

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Review of \u3cem\u3eAmbition in America: Political Power and the Collapse of Citizenship\u3c/em\u3e by Jeffrey A. Becker

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