ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that wealth provides spatial and temporal empowerment through which wealthy men construct autonomous realms of freedom and sovereign self-mastery, or "principalities," that embody their personal goals and desires, or "individuality." It suggests that the empowerment of wealth in the everyday is dependent on a particular narrative form that enables wealthy men to know and make sense of their power as a sign of virtuous moral identity. The chapter analyses the moral economy of wealth begins with a consideration of how wealth as power and empowerment is experienced, and how that experience is narrated or storied, in the everyday life-world of wealthy men. It shows that narrativity operates as a form and performance of power/knowledge that provides men of wealth with a grid of intelligibility of both know-how and can-do-ness that allows them to appropriate wealth as a source of empowerment and a sign of valorized moral identity.
