The Manly Ambition of Political Animals

How should we explain people like Barack Obama and Mitt Romney?  And how should we explain the rest of us--that we are so fascinated by their rivalry?

People like Obama and Romney are ambitious men, and their ambition is to be on top, to be the dominant individual ruling over all others, the alpha male.

Ambition matters in the study of politics.  Remarkably, however, many political scientists look to impersonal laws of political behavior and abstract models of rational choice in which the personal ambition of political actors falls out of view.  Against this tendency, a few political scientists (like Harvey Mansfield) have asserted that politics is all about the manly spiritedness of ambitious political actors competing for importance.  Looking back to the political psychology of political philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Madison, political scientists like Mansfield explain political ambition as an expression of thumos--of the desire to be recognized as superior, the love of fame and glory.

Biopolitical science explains such political ambition as the striving for hegemonic dominance that arises among political animals organizing themselves into hierarchies of dominance and submission.  Among human beings and some other primates, this competition for dominance creates a tense balance of power between the desire of the dominant few to rule and the desire of the subordinate many to be free from exploitation.

Abraham Lincoln was an example of a restlessly ambitious man who yearned to do something great in politics that would bring immortal glory to his name.  His ambition was channelled and checked by the American system of constitutional government.  But that constitutional system also allowed him to satisfy his ambition for glory.  After he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, he told his old friend Joshua Speed that he had finally satisfied that dream of glory that he had had since he was a young man. 

Lincoln's ambition is well presented by Doris Kearns Goodwin in her book A Team of Rivals, which has been used by Stephen Spielberg in making his new movie Lincoln.  We'll have to see how much of the greatness of the book comes through in the movie.

New York University Press has just published Evolution and Morality, edited by James Fleming and Sanford Levinson, which has a chapter by me--"Biopolitical Science"--that offers a biopolitical explanation of Lincoln's ambition as displayed in his decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation and then support the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution.  (Apparently, Lincoln's support for the Thirteenth Amendment is the primary story for the Spielberg movie.)

My evolutionary explanation of Lincoln's ambition moves through three levels of deep political history--the natural history of political universals, the social history of political cultures, and the individual history of political judgments.

At the level of political universals, we can see Lincoln's ambition as an evolved propensity of human political psychology that human beings share with other political animals.  Primatologists have noticed that chimpanzees who become dominant display distinctive character traits--such as self-confidence, boldness, assertiveness, and clever intelligence in social manipulation and coalition formation.  Whether these abilities lead to success in competing for dominance will depend, however, on lucky circumstances.  Just as Machiavelli indicated, becoming the Prince depends on a combination of virtue and fortune.  Success in winning and holding dominance will also depend on whether a dominant individual can secure the deference of subordinates and avoid being overthrown by subordinate individuals forming alliances to resist exploitative dominance.  Primate politics is based on the complex interaction of the dominant one, the ambitious few, and the submissive many.

At the level of political cultures, we can see Lincoln's ambition as constrained and channelled by the cultural institutions and cultural history of the American regime, which includes a constitutional system that empowers the presidency within a network of checks and balances.  That constitutional system protected slavery, but it also opened the possibility of abolishing slavery through the war powers of the president and the amendment of the Constitution.  Like human political communities, chimpanzee groups show cultural diversity that arises from the unique cultural history of each group.  But human political culture is uniquely human insofar as it expresses the uniquely human capacity for symbolic evolution.

At the level of individual history, we can see Lincoln's ambition as expressed in his prudential judgment as to whether, when, and how he could issue the Emancipation Proclamation successfully.  Other political primates show a similar capacity for prudential judgment, and the success of dominant apes depends on their ability for prudent judgment.  Aristotle saw this, because he indicated in his biological writings that some animals show prudence insofar as they learn from experience and use forethought in judging what is good for their lives, and he also recognized that apes were the animals most closely related to human beings.

Thus, a biopolitical science of political ambition would combine genetic evolution, cultural evolution, and biographical history in explaining the psychology of dominance as expressed among all political animals.

A sample of some of the posts on related topics can be found here, here, here, here, here, and here.