ABSTRACT
Since a man’s fortune is as easily unmade as it is made, the Self-Made Man is uncomfortably linked to the volatile marketplace, and he depends upon continued mobility. Of course, Self-Made Men were not unique to America, they were known as nouveaux riches in revolutionary France (and also known as noblesse de robe, as well as other, less pleasant, terms, in the preceding century), and they had their counterparts in every European country But in America, the land of immigrants and democratic ideals, the land without hereditary titles, they were present from the start, and they came to dominate much sooner than in Europe.
