Education Commons^™

The Neoliberal Pariah, Jeremiah Howe

College of Education Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores primarily the work of Hannah Arendt and its relationship with the milieu of 21st century U.S. capitalism, sometimes referred to as neoliberal capitalism. Beginning with her work on Jewish pariahdom, this paper explores the Arendtian pariah’s journey from a useful sociological phylum in studying The Jewish Question, to its capitalist iteration as an apt description of the lived reality of the white working-class. As Parvikko (1996) explains, Arendt worked on three levels of abstraction in order to tie the phenomenal to the theoretical so that she could frame the individual. In so doing, Arendt was able to …