Review of Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference by Rutger Bregman (Little, Brown and Company, 2025)
Dutch historian Rutger Bregman can hardly complain about a lack of media attention. His works are on the shelves in bookshops around the world — making him an intellectual superstar. His new book, Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference, immediately hit the top of the best-seller list in the Netherlands upon its publication in March 2024. The book was launched there at the same time as the School for Moral Ambition, an NGO of which he is the cofounder.
It is, quite appropriately, Bregman’s most ambitious project to date, following his previous work on universal basic income and progress and his 2019 book, Humankind: A Hopeful History — a huge publishing success also in English translation. Now he says he not only wants to write, but also to take action. The School for Moral Ambition should become nothing less than a global movement.
With his latest book, Bregman takes up ideas that have gained much traction in the English-speaking world, for instance with the charitable movement effective altruism (EA). English philosopher Benjamin Todd, one of its founders, had already made a plea similar to Bregman’s in his 2016 book, 80,000 Hours.
Bregman rails against “waste of talent.” Many well-paid and successful people choose a secure career, instead of pursuing change and “making a difference.” Other measures of success are needed, he insists, such as doing good and social impact. What he believes is lacking is “moral ambition.”
Bregman clarifies this using a classification into four categories. People who are neither ambitious…
Auteur: Helmer Stoel
