From Ambition to the Pursuit of Glory: Machiavelli’s Teaching to the Ambitious Elites

Abstract

Machiavelli is regarded as the first political thinker who puts ambition at the center of his political project and tries to harness it through republican institutions, yet his moral solution to ambition often goes overlooked. In this thesis, I aim to demonstrate that Machiavelli warns in Discourses that ambition can be very subversive even in the republic with a well-ordered constitution, which makes a moral teaching of glory to the ambitious elites necessary. By the exemplary case of Camillus, instead of assimilating the pursuit of glory into a generic conception of civic virtue or simply conflating it with ambition, Machiavelli provides a particular teaching of glory to the political elites in uncorrupted republics. This moderate teaching asks them to be law-abiding forms sharp contrast with his more well-known assertion that achieving the highest glory of founding a republic always requires extraordinary measures. Finally, through an analysis of his notion of glory, I argue that Machiavelli attempts to persuade the ambitious citizens into serving the common good by the reward of glory that is unlikely to happen in this world.