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Back when I interviewed historian and author Rutger Bregman ahead of the release of his last book, Humankind, he joked that he wanted to release an anti-self-help book – a book that makes your life harder after you read it.
Five years later, here it is. Moral Ambition is a pacy, compelling read about how you can use your life to make a difference. It’s a self-help book of a kind, promising to bring purpose and meaning to your life. But it also lays down a challenge, seeking to grab its reader by the lapels and shake them out of sleepwalking through their life. “Moral ambition”, Bregman says, “is the will to make the world a wildly better place. To devote your working life to the great challenges of our time. It’s a longing to make a difference – and build a legacy that truly matters.”
As you move through the chapters, however, it becomes difficult to grasp specifically what Bregman is suggesting you do with your life or exactly what guiding philosophy he is adhering to. He takes us to the brink of big ideas like utilitarianism and effective altruism, only to pull the handbrake at the last second, slightly distancing himself from those disciplines.
Don’t let yourself become obsessed, he says one moment. Don’t be afraid of the ostracism of standing alone against public opinion, he says in another. Follow your passion, one moment. Work out meticulously what makes the most impact, the next. Well, which is it?
In the end, the underlying point you can confidently draw from Moral Ambition – as if it were some grand revelation – is that you can use your working life to do good in the world, and you should do that. A worthy enough piece of advice, but not necessarily one that warrants a 200-page thesis, and a somewhat slighter subject matter than the very question of human nature addressed in his previous book.
Still, it’s worth situating this quasi-self-help book in the context of the writing that packs out much of these shelves in bookshops. Whether it’s self-help, self-improvement or selftherapy, the overriding focus is (unsurprisingly) the self, often as an individual neoliberal unit of profit maximisation, pushing you to compete, elbow your way to the top, lean in, hustle.
Around the same time that I read Moral Ambition, I also read What’s Your Dream? by Simon Squibb. It would have been a terrific read if my dream were to start a business that I could sell for a profit – because that’s what the book told me how to do. If that’s not your dream, then dream on, I guess.
In this context, a mainstream book that situates your potential personal contribution within a collective endeavour across nations and generations – the possibility of curing disease, tackling the climate crisis, improving the lives of others – suddenly seems like much loftier and worthwhile words of encouragement. And, if nothing else, Bregman’s pop history reads like a rollicking pep talk of case studies and stories of people who have led lives with real dignity and purpose, from abolitionists to second-world-war resistance figures.
Until this point, Bregman has balanced his upbeat optimism with an edge of radicalism and willingness to speak truth to power – notoriously encapsulated in the viral clip of his calling for a wealth tax on a panel at Davos, or his debut book calling for a 15-hour working week and a basic income. Here that edge has been blunted a bit.
For some people, Moral Ambition will flirt overly closely with worldviews that too readily accept the precepts of the status quo rather than upending the tables of economic and political injustice. But this is a book with the readability to become one of the year’s biggest sellers, and there are far worse words of encouragement to shape the mainstream discourse in 2025.
Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference by Rutger Bregman. Bloomsbury, 2025 ISBN: 1526680602
