Ambition

The English word ambition entered the language in the fourteenth century through Old French, from the Latin ambitio, a noun derived from ambire, meaning "to go around."1 In republican Rome, ambitio described the practice of political candidates walking around the city to solicit votes, literally going from person to person to secure support. The word carried no automatic praise. Roman writers used it to describe both legitimate campaigning and the corrupt pursuit of power.

By the time the word reached English, the political specificity had faded, but the moral ambiguity persisted. Through the medieval period and into the Renaissance, ambition was frequently associated with sin, particularly the sin of pride.2 Christian theology treated the desire to rise above one's station as a spiritual hazard. In Dante's Purgatorio, excessive ambition is punished on the terrace of pride.

The rehabilitation of ambition as a positive trait accelerated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, alongside the emergence of industrial capitalism and the idea that personal advancement reflected merit rather than vanity.3 Andrew Carnegie and other industrialists framed ambition as a civic virtue, the engine that drove both personal success and public prosperity.

The Latin root preserved in the word still describes circular motion rather than linear ascent. A Roman candidate went around; the modern usage implies going up.