ABSTRACT
The paradox of the self becomes explicitly the paradox of narrative plot as the reader consumes it: diminishing as it realizes itself, leading to an end that is the consummation of its sense-making. Within the story space of the narrative of fortune of virtue among men of the American upper class as the emplotment and emplacement of the sovereign individual is absolute and final. The purpose behind investigating the power/knowledge of wealth is not simply to understand its genealogy. If good citizenship and sovereignty are defined wholly in terms of possessing that which is procured in the marketplace—money, wealth, com modities—then clearly the wealthy are the best citizens of all. The civic republican notion of civic virtue was incorporated into the moral economy of wealth as a sign of the magisterial status of the sovereign individual while effacing what the civic republicans understood to be the foundation of good citizenship: economic equality and security.
