Ambition Without Hierarchy: The American Experiment at 250

Plus an artist fights fires in Amsterdam, music industry anxiety, and more

Adam Smith reads the Declaration of Independence as imagined by Ideogram.ai.

I was greatly honored and somewhat intimidated when Liberty Fund invited me to write the capstone essay in their two-year series marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. For my essay, I drew on Adam Smith’s work—this is also the 250th anniversary of The Wealth of Nations—to explore how the principles articulated in the Declaration fueled a distinctive American culture of restlessness and ambition. Viewing that culture through Smith’s writings about status, labor, and mobility illuminates just how much American ideals and American culture have been intertwined since the beginning. It also suggests how much the anomaly of slavery distorted both, creating a zero-sum region in a positive-sum nation.

You can read the full essay on Liberty Fund’s site here. Here is the opening.

In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith suggested a way that Great Britain might end the conflict with its American colonies: Offer each colony free trade with Britain and representation in Parliament based on the proportion of taxes the colony supplied to the empire. Aside from its economic logic, the idea suited Smith’s understanding of the rebels’ motivations. It would give colonial leaders what he believed they really wanted.

A peaceful reconciliation, he argued, was impossible without a way “of preserving the importance and of gratifying the ambition of the leading men of America….”

The persons who now govern the resolutions of what they call their continental congress, feel in themselves at this moment a degree of importance which, perhaps, the greatest subjects in Europe scarce feel. From shopkeepers, tradesmen, and attornies, they are become statesmen and legislators, and are employed in contriving a new form of government for an extensive empire, which, they flatter themselves, will become, and which, indeed, seems very likely to become, one of the greatest and most formidable that ever was in the world.

By allotting the colonies their own parliamentary seats, Smith wrote, “a new method of acquiring importance, a new and more dazzling object of ambition would be presented to the leading men of each colony. Instead of piddling for the little prizes which are to be found in what may be called the paltry raffle of colony faction; they might then hope, from the presumption which men naturally have in their own ability and good fortune, to draw some of the great prizes which sometimes come from the wheel of the great state lottery of British politics.”

Smith believed, in short, that the American Revolution was driven by ambition. Campaigning for their liberties let obscure provincials feel like big shots. A sense of power and significance trickled down from members of the Continental Congress to village committees enforcing boycotts against British goods, Daughters of Liberty organizing spinning bees, even children collecting tea to be burned in bonfires.

“Almost every individual of the governing party in America fills, at present in his own fancy, a station superior, not only to what he had ever filled before, but to what he had ever expected to fill; and unless some new object of ambition is presented either to him or to his leaders, if he has the ordinary spirit of a man, he will die in defence of that station,” Smith wrote.

Smith couched his recommendations as analysis, designed to find the best outcome for all concerned. He wasn’t moralizing against ambition. Throughout his writings, he assumed that the desire to better one’s condition, and thus enjoy greater public esteem, was an enduring characteristic of human psychology. It could even prove productive.

The famous story of the poor man’s son in The Theory of Moral Sentiments treats ambition as a personal folly but a social good. Admiring the leisured lives of the rich, a striving young fellow scrambles to achieve their station through hard work and self-promotion. “He makes his court to all mankind; he serves those whom he hates, and is obsequious to those whom he despises,” Smith wrote. “Through the whole of his life he pursues the idea of a certain artificial and elegant repose which he may never arrive at, for which he sacrifices a real tranquillity that is at all times in his power.” The unfortunate man has been misled by a glamorous image of wealth and greatness. Yet, Smith concluded, “it is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind.”

Smith’s bemused, dispassionate tone represented a dramatic shift in the western understanding of ambition—a shift that would accelerate in the culture arising from the Declaration’s principles. For centuries, the Christian church had condemned ambition as a sin. It was an attribute of kings and conquerors, of those seeking power and domination. Even Machiavelli decried it in a poem titled “Dell’Ambizione,” writing that “Every man hopes to climb higher by crushing now one, now another, rather than through his own wisdom and goodness.” Ambition disrupted the social order, bringing destruction and strife. It was winner-take-all. Think of Macbeth.

An Anglican homily—dating to 1571 but still in print as late as the nineteenth century—defined ambition as “the unlawful and restless desire in men to be of higher state than God hath given or appointed unto them.” Ambition was a grievous offense, springing from “Luciferian pride and presumption.” Virtuous Christians knew their place. The leaders of the rebel colonies were, in this view, treasonous sinners.

The drafters of the Declaration of Independence understood the stigma. They changed its first sentence to make it less provocatively ambitious, historian William Casey King argues in Ambition, A History: From Vice to Virtue. Thomas Jefferson’s original draft read, “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for a people to advance from that subordination in which they have hitherto remained….” That formulation skittered dangerously close to articulating a desire to be higher than God ordained. Avoiding the reference to hierarchy, the phrase was softened to “for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another….” (Emphasis added.) The new formulation subtly suggested that the two parties were previously equal partners rather than conceding—and hence challenging—the mother country’s superior status.

It was, of course, the next sentence of the Declaration that became the fundamental tenet of the American creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, 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.” This was a statement of liberal political philosophy, embedded in intellectual history. But the principles of the Declaration quickly became something more: a cultural force shaping the lives and expectations of ordinary Americans who would never read John Locke or encounter the concept of eudaemonia.

Read the rest here.

How Amsterdam Invented the Fire Department

My latest Works in Progress column is on how Jan van der Hayden, a painter famed for his city scenes, created the equipment and organization that conquered the raging fires in 17th-century Amsterdam. Here’s the opening:

In the seventeenth century, Amsterdam was likely the wealthiest city in the world. Global trade and local industry financed its artistic masterpieces and furnished the abundant foods and household goods that Dutch painters immortalized in still lifes and domestic scenes.

But material abundance and industrial activities also heightened an ancient danger: they added fuel to the flames of urban fires.

‘People of all ranks owned more clothes and furnishings. Curtains became far more common: easily set alight by a carelessly positioned candle, they were the source of many fires that then spread to wooden furniture and walls’, writes historian David Garrioch.

If its homes were vulnerable, Amsterdam’s factories, workshops, and piers were in even greater peril. Maintaining all those ships required stores of highly combustible pitch, tar, turpentine, and hemp. Soap makers, bakeries, sail makers, saw mills, cloth printers, picture frame makers, and the occasional alchemist contributed their own fire hazards. So did the burgeoning industries of brewing, printing, resin making, and sugar refining.

Yet Amsterdam avoided the disastrous equivalent of London’s Great Fire of 1666. In the last three decades of the century, in fact, the toll from fires dropped dramatically. Behind this improvement lay a culture of inventiveness and, just as important, what we today might call state capacity.

Musical Abundance

The latest open-access episode of our podcast “Everyday Abundance” is “Listening to Music,” featuring special guest John Hardin. One of our favorites, “Doing Laundry,” is up behind the paywall. For episode descriptions and links to audio and video of all episodes, visit our page on the Abundance Institute site.

In “Everyday Abundance,” Charles C. Mann and I explore the hidden histories behind everyday activities and technologies you didn’t even know were technologies. Please listen, subscribe, comment, like, share, and donate so we can keep doing this!

Odds and Ends

• Publishers Weekly reports that “Penguin Random House is raising its entry-level salary from $51,000 to $55,000, effective August 3.” PRH, one of the “big five” publishers, typically pays the most. From PW: “Currently, Hachette Book Group offers a starting salary of $52,500. Macmillan raised its starting salaries to $47,500 in February 2023, while Simon & Schuster offers $50,000 base pay.” When I came out of college in 1982, I earned $20,000 and lived in Philadelphia. Adjusted for inflation, $55,000 today is equivalent to $15,722 and publishing jobs are in New York. Publishing is a tough business, so I understand the low salaries. But hiring only people with other sources of income inevitably skews what gets published.

• Postcards from a Confused Samurai is a delightful site (with spinoff books) of sweet and comic stories about American culture: “A wandering samurai tries to understand America. He came for honor. He stayed for free refills.” Aside from the warm feelings, it’s interesting because of the way the author uses AI:

The stories are written in Japanese by a guy in Japan. He writes them at his desk, mostly at night, mostly while drinking convenience-store coffee that he secretly considers superior to American gas-station coffee, although he would never say so to the samurai’s face.

They are then translated into English with the help of a small army of AI tools — for nuance, for rhythm, for the small jokes that do not survive the jump between languages. The English you read here is collaborative: human taste, machine assistance, many drafts, no shortcuts.

• Gary Winslett on an Abundance agenda for rural America in general and Mississippi in particular. “People who want to help the rural areas often end up implicitly endorsing a kind of nostalgic economic vision: bring back manufacturing, protect agricultural communities, slow down the transitions. But that’s the same mistakes Mississippi’s leaders kept making. Instead, we should identify what a place can actually make or do that the market will pay for into the future. Mississippi, it turns out, has more to offer on that front than almost anyone realizes.” He goes on to explore Mississippi’s aviation and aerospace potential. Who knew?

• Aaron Ross Powell interviewed me for the Liberalism.org podcast.

• When Michael Faraday, a working-class lad apprenticed to a bookbinder happened on Conversations on Chemistry in the early 1800s, the book changed his life. When I saw a copy on display at the Science History Museum in Philadelphia, I was intrigued by the notion of a book about cutting-edge science that was aimed at the general public, especially women. In this Nautilus article, Regan Penaluna tells the story of Jane Marcet and her bestselling book: “Marcet’s story reminded me that scientific advancement depends on the less glamorous but no less important work of informing us not only of its significance but its wonders.” Conversations on Chemistry is available from the Internet Archive.