This paper addresses two issues in the area of accounting that I think are relevant to the present financial crisis and its aftermath. The first is the current “convergence project” whose goal is a single, unified set of accounting principles for for-profit, exchange-listed private business entities. This development deserves attention because it is widely unfamiliar to nonspecialists, but also because its genesis and development coincide with the ascendancy of post-WWII neoliberalism. Too, its full implementation would occasion major changes in the processes of measuring economic value. Its importance for what follows rests on the claims made by convergence advocates that this project will serve the public interest in its streamlining of private, for-profit accounting, a claim that certainly carries with it assumptions about an ideal equilibrium between public and private. My second focus will be on a 2006 White Paper from the US Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB), which makes a strong argument for a distinction between public and private accounting practices. This document motivated my choice to go back to the 18th century for inspiration, since the White Paper struck me on first reading as the kind of document that prompts comparison with what one might generally call the spirit of the Enlightenment, in its positive but also critical senses. In other words, it offers a strong statement of principle – one that is highly morally inflected, clearly about values and just as clearly oriented toward a perceived threat of the priorities and procedures of government being undermined or even displaced by those of the corporation. In its emphasis on a notion of citizenship that is not equivalent or subordinate to the market or market behavior, I think it is in some important ways directly linked to certain Enlightenment ideals, particularly of representative government. Being a statement of principle, I will be using it here in order to raise some questions about the ways that public and private meet, and also to question the ‘corporatization’ of the public sphere.