This dissertation explores the role played by the desire for recognition in Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau. Through investigating ambizione, glory, and amour-propre, I show how each thinker’s respective concept captures and crystalizes both the chief problems and promise of politics. For Machiavelli, ambizione is the key cause of corruption and instability; for Hobbes, glory is the fundamental source of violence and rebellion; for Rousseau, amour-propre is the psycho-social foundation of inequality and domination. But because ambizione, glory, and amour-propre can never be wholly eliminated or completely suppressed, I reveal how each thinker ultimately becomes concerned with finding ways to reorient instead of repress pride, and to subdue it by satisfying it. I present ‘pride’ as my capacious umbrella concept and organizing term, which encompasses both the universal demand for equal respect and consideration, and also the exclusive drive for positional relations of power and status. I argue that: Machiavelli’s political solution entails externalizing elite ambition abroad, while combating it domestically through democratic avenues that vent popular ambition; that satisfying citizen’s glory through relations of equality is essential to how Hobbes secures peace through the civil laws; and that amour-propre is co-opted by Rousseau in order to support and protect citizens’ autonomy, without ever being completely replaced by selfless amour de la patrie. I argue that common to each thinker’s solution to the political problem of pride is the paradoxical insight that, although pride is a desire for inequalities in esteem, in order to avoid the dangerous dynamics it typically produces, it must first pass through—and be built upon—relations of equal recognition. This means that a state must find ways of cultivating in its citizens’ egalitarian self-conceptions that don’t require the domination of others, at the same time as providing avenues through which each can distinguish themselves as especially worthy of honor based on one’s contribution to the common good. Through these thinkers, I advance two claims about democracy: first, its dispersal of political power is exceptionally suited to satisfying universal demands for equal consideration; second, its institutions are indispensable in reorienting exclusive hierarchies towards shared goods. Democracies, I argue, are uniquely capable of transforming struggles for recognition from a source of instability into a spring of resiliency. Finally, I argue that Hobbes’s and Rousseau’s treatment of (and solution to) the problem of pride appropriates Genesis, effectively secularizing the Judeo-Christian sin of pride, and offering a kind of ‘salvation through the state,’ which becomes a God-like entity responsible for creating order and value out of nothingness. Through their collective creation and reproduction of the state, citizens find a way to reorient and sublimate their pride, becoming their own foundation without elevating their own personal will over that of this new God—thereby re-entering their own imperfect Eden(s) in a fallen world.