Ambition in America: Political Power and the Collapse of Citizenship
Ambition in America: Political Power and the Collapse of Citizenship
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Abstract
This is a book about the necessity of political ambition for the success of American democracy. Democracies face an enduring problem encouraging, harnessing, and inevitably restraining the passions citizens have to wield political power in a civic forum. This book describes how evolving American political institutions and forms of association struggle to inspire, guide, and constrain the ambition of citizens to rule within American politics. This book sheds light on the way power seeking behavior in America ends up transforming—and often undermining—the ways democracies attempt to hold the socially and politically powerful accountable. Ambition—the desire to rule—while often seen as a threat to the stability of republican self-government, actually plays a vital, though previously underexplored, role in sustaining a healthy polity. This book explores how relationships between the mechanisms of restraint and the ambitions of specific public figures and movements enhance or undermine the possibility of self-government.
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Front Matter
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Introduction: The Paradox of Power in America
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1
The Ambition of Moral Citizens: Belonging and the Limits of the Moral Community
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2
The Ambition of Interests: American Constitutionalism
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3
The Ambition of Popular Control: Jacksonian Democracy and American Populism
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4
The Ambition to Recover Democratic Excellence: Tocqueville and Franklin Delano Roosevelt
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5
To Flatter and Obey: The Triumph of Ambition
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6
Keeping Ambition Accountable: A Place for Political Parties
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Conclusion
The Collapse of Modern Citizenship
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End Matter
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