Excessive Ambition Research Articles

Reading Plutarch in nineteenth-century Greece: classical paideia, political emancipation, and national awareness -- the case of Adamantios Koraes

Adamantios Koraes (1748–1833) was a humanist scholar of the modern Greek Enlightenment, regarded by many as the reformer of the Hellenic nation of his time. In his attempt to cultivate the proper sort of education (paideia) and at the same time uplift the national pride of contemporary Greeks, Koraes turned to the revival of the ancient legacy by editing and often translating a wide range of classical texts. Among the various ancient Greek authors that he read, it is clear that Plutarch (c. ad 46–120) influenced him deeply. In this article, I examine two aspects of that influence. In the first section, I argue that while instructing his compatriots on ethical issues, Koraes aligns himself with Plutarch, whom he considers as his ancient role model. This is seen from the fact that in his biographical portrait of Plutarch Koraes is careful in drawing comparisons and links, sometimes explicit and in other instances more opaque, between himself and his precursor. In the second section, I suggest that Koraes is informed by Plutarch’s political outlook as well, and more particularly by his central notion of ϕιλοτιμία, which warns against excessive ambition and self-interest in statesmanship. This notion Koraes adjusts to his own political agenda in the form of ϕιλαρχία, which functions in modern times similarly to Plutarch’s ϕιλοτιμία in ancient times.

Corridors, Coordination, and the Entrepreneurial Theory of the Market Process

Daniel Klein (Klein 1997, Klein and Orsborn 2009 and Klein and Briggeman forthcoming) and Israel Kirzner (forthcoming) have been engaged in a debate concerning how economists should understand and use the terms “coordination” and “economic goodness”. Klein and Briggeman (forthcoming) contend that Kirzner suffers from excessive ambition scientifically. The authors claim Kirzner’s reliance and identification with “the Misesian image of science” threatens to discredit his more sensible contributions (e.g., market processes are driven towards progress by competitive entrepreneurial discovery). We offer a response to Klein and Briggeman’s claim that loose, vague and indeterminate forms of economic reasoning make for a more robust political economy. In doing so, we also explain the theoretical context surrounding Kirzner’s theory of the entrepreneurial market process. While we agree with Klein and Briggeman’s critique of scientism and formalism, we emphasize the nature of the debates over market theory and the price system that Kirzner was engaging in order to understand the reasons behind his methods and the theoretical insights they provide. Rather than the source of his failure, we view Kirzner’s “excessive ambitions” to provide a scientific foundation of the market process as the source of his great success as an economic theorist.

Vattel, Britain and Peace in Europe

AbstractThis paper underlines Vattel's commitment to maintaining the sovereignty of Europe's small states by enunciating the duties he deemed incumbent upon all political communities. Vattel took seriously the threat to Europe from a renascent France, willing to foster an equally aggressive Catholic imperialism justified by the need for religious unity. Preventing a French version of universal monarchy, Vattel recognised, entailed more than speculating about a Europe imagined as a single republic. Rather, Vattel believed that Britain had to be relied upon to prevent excessive French ambition, and to underwrite the independence of the continent's smaller sovereignties. Against those who saw Britain as another candidate for the domination of Europe, Vattel argued that Britain's commercial interests explained why it was a different kind of state to the great empires of the past. The paper goes on to consider the reception of Vattel's ideas after the Seven Years War. Although further research is required into readings of Vattel, especially in the smaller states of Europe in the later eighteenth century, the paper concludes that by the 1790s Vattel was being used to justify war to defeat the gargantuan imperialist projects of newly republican France, in order to maintain Europe itself, and the smaller states within it.

Comment on "Excessive Ambitions" (by Jon Elster)

In “Excessive Ambitions," Jon Elster criticizes a wide range of social science aspirations to understand a complicated and evolving reality. Some of his analysis is to the point, but some is flawed, as explained in my comments. Crucially, however, his conclusions on empirical modeling are diametrically opposite to what is required–the problem has been a serious lack of ambition. And this is precisely the area where Elster is most guilty of ‘criticizing others on the basis of third-party authorities.' Notwithstanding ‘pitfalls and fallacies in statistical data analysis,' heterogeneous, high-dimensional objects like economies, which are subject to large, intermittent, and usually unanticipated, shifts, require ambitious approaches to characterize their behavior. I will try and explain how more ambitious empirical objectives can be achieved by automatic modeling methods which enhance human capabilities in tackling complicated data problems. En route, I re-emphasize the closely linked explanation for forecast failure recently discussed by myself, Michael Clements and Neil Ericsson in this journal. That leaves open the key issue as to why unanticipated shifts occur, and I speculate on that lacuna in existing economic theories, most of which omit any discussion of the mean levels of variables, and almost none address why such means might shift.

Comment on "Excessive Ambitions" (by Jon Elster)

Jon Elster’s analysis of the current state of social sciences, and particularly of economics, is welcome in many respects. Elster’s situation, as an ‘informed outsider’, allows him to offer an extremely interesting perspective - an exhaustive and intelligent overview free of the vested interests that tend to bias insiders’ views. Moreover, Elster’s text reminds us of some basic but crucial (and somewhat overlooked) methodological rules and requirements; his approach is built on sound and robust epistemological foundations. Lastly, he provides the profession with an excellent opportunity to open a necessary and long overdue reconsideration of some of its basic principles. As such, it is a useful and important contribution. While I agree with most of Elster’s arguments, I will, somewhat provocatively, submit that they may actually support the opposite conclusion. That is, a serious problem with current economic practice is probably more a

Excessive Ambitions

The current financial crisis has brought out a fatal flaw in the foundations of the economic theories that guided economic agents and regulators: the unwarranted claim to precision and robustness. In this article I try to diagnose this flaw and discuss possible remedies. I argue that actual agents are intrinsically less sophisticated than the models assume they are, and that the various proposals to sustain the models by appealing to "as-if rationality" all fail. I next consider behavioral economics as an alternative to the standard models, claiming that while they may allow for successful retrodiction, they do not hold out much promise for prediction. I also discuss the use of statistical models, arguing that they are subject to so many traps and pitfalls that only a handful of elite practitioners can be trusted to use them well. Finally, I offer some speculations to explain the persistence in the economic profession and elsewhere of these useless or harmful models.

De las falsificaciones en la historia: Juan José Heydeck (n. 1755) y su «portentoso» descubrimiento de una vacuna contra la viruela

Juan Jose Heydeck (b. 1755) is a turbid figure that in the last years he is acquiring certain historical relief. His false find of a vaccine has been overvalued, in excess, against the smallpox in goats of Madrid. In this note, which is a response to an article appeared in Asclepio in 2006, this personage is checked from an historical point of view and there is demonstrated the falsehood of his find, fruit of his excessive ambition.

Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (review)

Born Losers: A History of Failure in America. By Scott A. Sandage. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Pp. x, 362. Cloth, $35.00.)Building on recent histories of business failure in the United States, Scott Sandage probes the cultural underside of the American Dream in the nineteenth century-or, to be less anachronistic, the efforts of the era's middle class to make sense of all the financial wreckage in its midst, wreckage largely strewn by its own relentless embrace of speculation, entrepreneurial drive, and general Go-Aheadism. Sandage is concerned equally with the meanings of pecuniary failure for prominent Americans like P. T. Barnum, Lydia Maria Child, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and for the mass of ordinary strivers. Focusing mostly on the period from the Panic of 1819 through the emergence of large-scale industrial corporations, he adds brief epilogue that considers understandings of failure in the twentieth century.Methodologically innovative and superbly written, Born Losers engages an impressive array of nineteenth-century conversations about bankruptcy. The obvious domains of political debate, periodical commentary, fiction, and private introspection receive attention, but so too do commercially inspired slang and particularly modern forms of commercial communication, such as the credit report and the begging letter. Throughout the book, Sandage emphasizes-and in the end, overemphasizes-a key transformation in the American meaning of failure: shift from ordeal to (4), from seeing bankruptcy as traumatic event to viewing it as an enduring social identity associated with marginality and worthlessness.Sandage sets this argument by exploring the social and cultural elevation of risk-taking and the search for profitable innovation in antebellum America, which increasingly became badges of manhood and honor within middle-class culture. The depth of commitment to this entrepreneurial ethos, he shows, went hand in hand with high rates of insolvency. Contemporaries were well aware of this connection and even tended to exaggerate its impact, widely circulating estimates that ninetyseven percent of business ventures left their proprietors flat broke, gone to smash, wiped out, or up tree, in the era's rich vocabu-lary for depicting commercial detritus (25). The ubiquity of failure, Sandage notes, only intensified the inclination to worship at the altar of success. To make it in world where more than nineteen business owners in twenty eventually found themselves on the unpleasant side of sheriff's sale was truly to demonstrate one's talent, perserverance, and economic superiority.At the same time, Sandage contends that nineteenth-century Americans largely remained convinced that bankruptcy was a moral sieve (17), and that in cases of failure, one could generally find, in Emerson's words, a reason, in the man (46). From the pulpit, on the editorial pages, and, after the 184Os, in the ledgers of credit reporting agencies, opinion makers perpetuated series of moral (50) that explained the descent into bankruptcy. The reason for failure was sometimes outright skullduggery, as when unscrupulous scamsters simply pretended to be insolvent as means of plundering creditors. More frequendy, it lay in variant of excessive ambition, such as improvident extravagance, imprudent speculation, unwise expansion of business beyond the safe confines of one's capital (a practice then known as overtrading), or the flunky's plunge into competitive and unforgiving marketplace.Born Losers skillfully tracks the impact of such master plots on the evolution of credit reporting, new form of bureaucratic surveillance that increasingly fixed commercial identity through time and space, as agencies like R. …

THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY: ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVES ON REGULATION IN AUSTRALIA

The paper examines the existing scope and role of regulations in Australia. While there are many benefits from regulation, there is also a myriad of, often underplayed, costs associated with regulations. While compliance costs are large, probably the most significant costs arise from behavioural responses to regulations that reduce efficiency or compromise social goals. These adverse effects are often unanticipated and arise from complex interactions between regulations. The main reasons for regulatory failure are excessive ambition (underestimating the deficiencies of the regulatory ‘solution’), capture of regulatory agencies, and poor regulatory processes and institutions. The paper offers some guidelines for producing better regulation.

Science, Animal Sympathy and Anna Barbauld's "The Mouse's Petition"

Barbauld's poem "The Mouse's Petition" provides an entree to mid-century debate about scientific experiments on animals and animal "feeling" as well as to the dynamics of science and gender in Barbauld's work. A response to Joseph Priestley's use of live mice in his laboratory, the poem embodies tensions in both writers' work between the desire for knowledge and misgivings about its ethical costs. Barbauld's writings promote science knowledge "for both sexes" while reinforcing cultural strictures against advanced learning for women and critiquing male scientists' excessive ambition. Amid controversy over vivisection and new arguments that animals experience sensation and pain, Barbauld, like other women writers, urged sympathy for non-human creatures, and Priestley's own writings betray uneasiness about injuring them. The "Petition" is part of an ongoing dialogue in which Barbauld reminded her friend of his own commitment to "benevolence." Reportedly delivered in a mouse's trap "after breakfast," the poem infiltrates the workspace of science through the domestic spaces of Priestley's home; mock-serious in tone, it engages serious issues in the treatment of animals as it deploys the rhetoric of sensibility to imagine a subject creature as an effective speaking subject.

In vivo characteristics of cationic liposomes as delivery vectors for gene therapy.

After a decade of clinical trials, gene therapy seems to have found its place between excessive ambitions and feasible aims, with encouraging results obtained in recent years. Intracellular delivery of genetic material is the key step in gene therapy. Optimization of delivery vectors is of major importance for turning gene therapy into a successful therapeutic method. Nonviral gene delivery relies mainly on the complexes formed from cationic liposomes (or cationic polymers) and DNA, i.e., lipoplexes (or polyplexes). Many lipoplex formulations have been studied, but in vivo activity is generally low compared to that of viral systems. This review gives a concise overview of studies on the application of cationic liposomes in vivo in animal models of diseases and in clinical studies. The transfection efficiency, the pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic properties of the lipid-DNA complexes, and potentially relevant applications for cationic liposomes are discussed. Furthermore, the toxicity of, and the induction of an inflammatory response in association with the administration of lipoplexes are described. Increasing understanding of lipoplex behavior and gene transfer capacities in vivo offers new possibilities to enhance their efficiency and paves the path to more extensive clinical applications in the future.

Scientific Integrity in Nursing Research

Though scientific knowledge is presumed to be true, misconduct in generation and reporting of research has occurred. Causes of scientific misconduct may be personal, such as excessive ambition, or organizational, such as withholding negative results about a product for economic gain. Ethical conduct of science involves respect for persons, beneficence and justice throughout the research process. The bottom line is researchers must have the integrity to be truthful themselves and the courage to report disreputable practices. Nurses must conduct scientific endeavors and practice the science of nursing with integrity. Maintaining integrity is essential for the advancement of nursing as a science, and therefore, ongoing improvement in nursing care.

Power and Pleasure: Louis Barthou and the Third French Republic.

Neither Barthou's contemporaries nor subsequent historians have known quite what to make of this politician who fought a duel with Jean Jaures and flew with Wilbur Wright. Many concluded he was an individual of considerable talent, few principles, and excessive ambition. No one, reading Power and Pleasure, can maintain that view. Robert Young, constructing a complete picture of Barthou, effectively refutes the charge of unprincipled ambition and deftly deals with the tension between political principles and pragmatism. Young has written a social biography, situating Barthou's life -- both public and private -- in the political and cultural context of the Third Republic. Barthou was a centrist in his politics and, while current scholarship maintains that centrists adopted regressive strategies in response to the social question, Young presents an alternative reading of their position. He argues that although centrists like Barthou were not socialists -- for them bourgeois was a positive term -- they were capable of adjusting their ideals to meet the social changes of modern France. Barthou's turbulent political career was tempered both by a thirty-five-year marriage to his supportive wife and by a lifetime of pleasure derived from music, art, history, books, and literature.

Alexander Bogdanov and the Problem of the Socialist Intelligentsia

The two articles on Bogdanov in present issue of The Russian Review concentrate on same general problem but approach it from different angles and lead to different conclusions.1 The problem can be defined as proper understanding of Bogdanov's position in classical controversy about intellectuals in workers' movement. The first article, dealing with Bogdanov as leader of Vperedist faction of prerevolutionary bolshevism, presents him as yet another theorist of the tutelary role of social Democratic Intelligentsia in workers' movement;2 theorist whose views on this subject were in fact more consistent and extreme than Lenin's, and could therefore be used by those members of intelligentsia who wanted, consciously or unconsciously, to constitute themselves into a class. The second article, devoted to postrevolutionary period, subscribes to more widespread opinion-to view of Bogdanov as theorist of distinctively proletarian culture. From this perspective Bogdanov's Marxism-defined by him as philosophy of collectivism and finding expression in practices of Proletkult-appears to be staunch defense of autonomy of workers' movement and warning against excessive ambitions of organizing intelligentsia. In other words, two authors see Bogdanov as an important contributor to theory of intelligentsia as potential new but greatly differ from each other in defining nature of his contribution: first regards him as de facto supporter of tendency to form such class, while second classified him as theorist for whom possibility of class rule was threat to workers' movement, danger which should have been resisted and avoided. To bring this difference into sharp focus, we can say that first

THE AMBITIONS OF POLICY DESIGN

There is no shortage of warnings concerning the hazards of excessive ambition in consciously‐pursued public policy. In the light of these cautions, this paper considers the appropriate ambitions for policy design. The critics have missed the target. There is no need to fear ambition in policy design, provided that openness in communications about policy is secured.

Political Behavior in the Coffee Agreement

Previous articleNext article No AccessPolitical Behavior in the Coffee AgreementDa-Hsiang Donald Lien and Robert H. BatesDa-Hsiang Donald Lien Search for more articles by this author and Robert H. Bates Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Economic Development and Cultural Change Volume 35, Number 3Apr., 1987 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/451607 Views: 4Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1987 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Jon Elster Rational Choice History: A Case of Excessive Ambition - Analytic Narratives. By Robert H. Bates, Avner Greif, Margaret Levi, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, and Barry Weingast. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. 296p. $65.00 cloth, $22.95 paper., American Political Science Review 94, no.33 (Sep 2000): 685–695.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055400271360

John Morgan: Continental Doctor

The name of John Morgan is a familiar one in the history of American medical education and of colonial Philadelphia where he was responsible for creating the first American medical school in 1765. After a brilliant beginning his life ended in melancholy bitterness, with the promises of his youth unfulfilled. It is this tragic story that Whitfield J. Bell, Jr., PhD, narrates with scholarly objectivity and scrupulous documentation. From painstakingly researched facts emerges the portrait of a man whose excessive ambition and stubborn determination elevated him to early greatness but also caused him to squander his productive years in exhausting efforts to preserve his reputation and to discredit a rival. As director-general of the General Hospital of the Continental Army from 1775 to 1777, Morgan was victimized by refractory regimental surgeons and a Congress unable to designate clear lines of authority in the Medical Department. After his dismissal he wasted

Technique and Devices Conductive to better teaching of Geometry

The difficulties facing the teacher of plane geometry grow constantly more baffling. Enforced attendance at school until the boy or girl is sixteen, with a group of pupils often unfitted mentally, by environment, or by ambition for a high school education, presents an immediate and ever-looming problem. An insufficient number of trade schools or excessive ambition on the part of generous parents, desirous of seeing their children in the professions rather than in the trades, fills the classes of such a subject as plane geometry. Moreover the subject is generally required for college entrance, and is regarded almost universally as cultural, broadening, and conducive to mental development characterized by clear expression and logical thinking. The position of the teacher of this subject fifteen or twenty years ago when a select few with real ability pursued the subject was not nearly so complex. Now every youth who has managed to pass to the tenth grade and takes up plane geometry all but assumes that a passing understanding of the subject is his birthright. Perhaps it would be conceded that plane geometry is the first great obstacle to the youth's securing a coveted diploma. Or possibly it might be stated thus: it is in his attack upon this subject in which the frailty of his mental make-up is most in evidence, most pitilessly laid bare, if there is such weakness; or, on the other hand, his power of intellect is here first appreciated by others, and, with great satisfaction, by himself. Hence the instructor of plane geometry to-day who would teach the subject in a forceful and effective manner, developing his pupils, convincing them of its influence, its use and keen intellectual enjoyment, must be forever on his toes inventing and contriving devices and stratagems to teach satisfactorily this large group, less clever, less ambitious, less able, than heretofore, taken in the cross-section. What a wonderful people the citizens of the United States would be intellectually several generations hence if all who attempt a high school education really had the ambition and ability to master it.