This book maps the development of a social and rhetorical phenomenon called investment citizenship: a mode of citizen-subjectivity articulated primarily through financial and affective investments. Investment citizenship is both a marker of personal identity and a complex, interwoven set of rhetorics, forces, actions, and assumptions that articulate the role of investment in social life. To that end, it examines three rhetorical couplets—investment and citizenship, financial investment and affective investment, to invest and to be invested—directly and through several cultural phenomena implicated by the emergence of investment rhetoric, such as US government policy, consumerism, ownership, education, and financial planning. Taken together, these couplets both extend and challenge late neoliberalism through the various invocations and implications of investment citizenship that reconfigure the relationship between the individual and society.
