It may seem an exaggeration to say that ambition is something that can hold many of the society's disparate elements together, but it is not an exaggeration by much. Remove ambition and the essential elements of society seem to fly apart. Ambition, as opposed to mere fantasizing about desires, implies work and discipline to achieve goals, personal and social, of a kind society cannot survive without. Ambition is intimately connected with family, for men and women not only work for themselves, but partly for their families; husbands and wives are often ambitious for each other, but harbor some of their most ardent ambitions for their children. Yet to have a family nowadays-with birth control readily available, and inflation a good economic argument against having children-is nearly an expression of ambition in itself. Finally, though ambition was once the domain chiefly of monarchs and aristocrats, it has, in more recent times, increasingly become the domain of the middle classes.

　　說雄心大志能將社會中各種各樣的因素集中到一起, 這聽起來似乎有些夸大其詞, 但其實 并沒有過分夸大。沒有雄心, 組成社會的諸要素就會分散開來。雄心大志與純粹的欲望狂想 根本不同, 它意味著為實現(xiàn)某種個人或社會的目標而努力工作, 自戒自律, 而一個社會若沒有 這樣的目標就無法存在下去。雄心大志還與家庭有著十分密切的關系, 因為男男女女并不僅為自己工, 也為他們的家庭; 夫妻之間不僅相互懷有雄心大志, 更對自己的子女懷著不倦的 雄心�？蓵r至今, 計劃生育的方法隨處可得, 通貨膨脹又為不要孩子提供了強有力的經(jīng)濟借, 要組建家庭本身就成了一件需要雄心大志的事情。最后, 雄心大志曾一度是君王和貴族的領地, 可現(xiàn)在卻越來越成為中產(chǎn)階級圈內(nèi)的事情了。