SURVEYS HAVE shown that 31 percent of American teenagers expect to be famous one day. Their lofty expectations have been shaped by a phenomenon that historian Daniel J. Boorstin pointed to decades ago—the distinction between a heroic and a celebrity culture where people are famous for no other reason than that they are famous. Yet while the desire for fame and recognition may be inseparable from ambition, they are not the same thing. Ambitious people desire not only to be recognized but also to be deemed worthy of recognition. The concept of ambition is invariably tied to notions of honor and deference. Today, however, these terms have an obsolete sound.

“Honor,” as the sociologist Peter L. Berger has written, “occupies about the same place in contemporary usage as chastity,” that is, as “ideological leftovers in the consciousness of obsolete classes, such as military officers or ethnic grandmothers.” This is a slight—but only a slight—exaggeration. While “affairs of honor,” as they are quaintly called, seem to belong to a distant and benighted past, there are still organizations like the military, police and service academies that take the concept quite seriously. Many colleges and universities still abide by an “honor code,” but Berger is right to note that motives of honor no longer have standing in American courts of law where concepts like “loss of face” seem increasingly archaic.

There are, of course, good reasons for the decline or obsolescence of grand ambition. All of these terms—fame, glory, renown—have traditionally been associated with aristocratic societies where titles and privileges are handed down. Acts of bravery, heroism and self-abnegation were often linked to a person’s role in a social hierarchy. These hierarchies are in turn composed of highly competitive superachievers. There is certainly a zero-sum quality to terms like honor and ambition. They are diminished if they are shared. Thomas Hobbes, who understood the aristocratic ethos of honor better than most, saw it as inseparable from a society based on orders and ranks. “Glory is like honor,” he wrote in De Cive, “if all men have it, no man hath it.”

Moreover, the theme of great ambition is invariably related to the study of heroes or individuals of extraordinary accomplishment. There is, of course, a genre of popular history and biography that celebrates the accomplishments of certain outsized individuals. Yet the study of heroes seems to have something old-fashioned, if not elitist, about it. It is too often connected not just with heroes but with actual hero worship. Modern history and social science tend to be increasingly quantitative and data-driven, dealing more with the average than outsized individuals. Political scientists focus most of their attention on tracking that restive nobody called the “median voter.” We are more apt to explain events in terms of general causes—think of the triad of class, race and gender—rather than look to the exceptional qualities of certain rare individuals. When one turns to the study of heroes, it is often with a subversive intent. “No man is a hero to his valet because his valet is a valet,” Hegel said. Today, it should be added, we are all valets.

 

THE DECLINE in the status of honor and ambition is related to fundamental changes in our moral and political vocabulary beginning around the sixteenth century. These changes were inextricable from the transition from the medieval world based on hierarchy, status and honor to a new bourgeois or commercial world based on equality, contract and interest. Karl Marx called it the transition from feudalism to capitalism; Henry Maine, the transition from status to contract; Alexis de Tocqueville, the transition from the age of aristocracy to the age of democracy. But perhaps no one provided a more illuminating description than the economist and intellectual historian Albert O. Hirschman.

In The Passions and the Interests, Hirschman showed how the arguments for the commercial society were first made possible only after the destruction of the ancient heroic ideal that had made a return during the Renaissance with its rediscovery of the Greek and Roman celebration of glory. A whole series of writers beginning with Hobbes, but including Michel de Montaigne, Francis Bacon, Bernard Mandeville, Montesquieu, David Hume and Immanuel Kant turned their collective eye on discrediting the idea of the hero as nothing but a species of vanity and vainglorious ambition. In place of the heroic ideal with its pursuit of glory, these writers posited an alternative conception of human nature based on the benefits of commerce and self-interested behavior.

Hirschman noted that the transition to capitalism was only made possible due to the prior emergence of certain ideas and arguments. Markets are not simply natural forms of human association, as today’s libertarians often believe, but are embedded in a dense web of moral argumentation in which the pursuit of interest—so long considered a deadly sin within the Christian moral universe—came to be seen as a virtue for containing and combatting the destructive passions for fame and honor. The market society was an idea before it became a reality.

He also observed that the concept of self-interest is not a universal key for understanding all human behavior, as is so often claimed by economists and social scientists today. Rather, the idea of self-interest emerged as a strategy to counteract the dominance of certain passions, especially the kinds of desires associated with fame, honor and heroic immortality. The pursuit of interest was deemed to exercise a tranquilizing affect on society and on human behavior generally. The passions were seen as wild and irrational, while interests were thought to be calm, gentle, even placid. A society devoted to money making, as opposed to aristocratic practices like war, was described by such metaphors as “polishing,” “refining” and “softening” morals. A society dominated by the pursuit of interest could be counted upon as being less grand, noble and heroic, but more peaceful, prosperous and secure.

The idea of a modern commercial order came to fruition in America. It is no coincidence that the signing of the Declaration of Independence occurred the same year as the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, the first great treatise of market economics. The advocates of the commercial society, from Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, all regarded an ethic of self-interest rightly understood as a sane and sensible alternative to visions of moral perfection beyond the reach of all but a few, disdain for the common, useful and mundane employments, and most of all a world preoccupied—to a degree that we can scarcely imagine—with intangible goals like honor and glory.

And yet the effort to transform the competition for honor and glory into the bourgeois striving for commercial success was never complete. The ancient and medieval codes of honor never completely disappeared, even in the New World. In his classic study Fame and the Founding Fathers, Douglass Adair noted that Plutarch’s Lives remained a widely read and imitated book during the founding generation. This neoclassical love of fame survived throughout the early Republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence pledged not only their lives and liberty but their “sacred honor” to the cause to which they affixed their names. The authors of the Federalist Papers took the pen name of Publius after one of the founders of the Roman republic. And George Washington was regularly referred to as a modern-day Cincinnatus for the Roman farmer who left his plow to serve the republic and then returned to his fields, relinquishing power.

No one among the founders’ generation embodied the characteristics of classical virtue more fully than Washington. He combined effortlessly the qualities of rank, authority and the capacity to command that immediately compel respect. The quality of Washington’s hauteur is captured brilliantly in an anecdote related in James Madison’s notes on the Constitutional Convention. During the convention, it was Washington’s custom to open his home for a reception for some of those attending. Alexander Hamilton, who knew Washington well, mentioned to Gouverneur Morris that Washington was “reserved and aristocratic even to his intimate friends.” Morris suggested that this was a mere façade, so Hamilton bet him a dinner with wine for a dozen people if on their next meeting he would appear to treat Washington as his equal. The dare was accepted.

On the evening appointed, a large number attended; and at an early hour Gouverneur Morris entered, bowed, shook hands, laid his left hand on Washington’s shoulder and said, “My dear General, I am very happy to see you look so well!” Washington withdrew his hand, stepped suddenly back and fixed his eye on Morris for several minutes with an angry frown, until the latter retreated abashed, and sought refuge in the crowd. The company looked on in silence. At the supper, which was provided by Hamilton, Morris said, “I have won the bet, but paid dearly for it, and nothing could induce me to repeat it.”

Washington may have exemplified the aristocratic ethos, but no one thought about it more profoundly than John Adams. To be sure, the image of founding a nation conjured in the minds of the revolutionary generation the images of classical antiquity’s greatest lawgivers. The names of Lycurgus, Solon and Theseus were never far from their minds. The revolution made it possible to relive the deeds of these mythical heroes. In his Discourses on Davila, Adams discussed the love of fame and divided it into three parts. Credit is on the lowest rung supported by merchants and tradesmen; reputation was cherished by gentlemen; but glory was the highest species of fame and was reserved for the great actions of lawgivers and the first officers of the state. Adams was following a long tradition in ranking the lawgiver or legislator as standing atop the ladder of fame.