On my trip in France, the geographers took us on a walking tour of Marseille. (Geographers love walking tours and I love them for that.) I wrote about the French initiative to fix this city’s elementary school buildings last week, but a debate bubbled up during the walking tour that I wanted to think through here. It’s about neoliberalism.

We were getting ready to go on a tour of several schools that Marseille had built, but I was thinking about Virginie Baby-Collin and Aude-lide Gervais’s presentation on the Marseille en Grand (MeG) and their claim that it was a neoliberal initiative because, once the French national government stepped in, it turned over much of the ‘development’ to agencies and firms that took a business approach to the project.

It reminded me of receivership in the US. Starting in California with West Contra Costa School District in the 1990s, then with well-known cases in Philadelphia and Harrisburg in Pennsylvania, and now Houston, Texas this sort of neoliberal recentralization features a municipality that, for one reason or another, is deemed in crisis. The existing phalanges of the repressive apparatus above the municipality (in the US case we have state government, in the French case there’s the national government along with the Department) kick into gear, taking away control from the municipality, while providing some resources along with oversight to address the crisis.

The recentralization also echoes mayoral control of schooling in the US, another key feature of the neoliberal period (which itself harkens back to the ‘progressive’ era) where instead of elected school boards, a school district is reconfigured into a department of the executive branch and thus can be changed by the mayor rather than going through the arduous process of democracy, representative deliberation, etc.

In each of these moves, we see something that, at first glance, doesn’t appear to be neoliberal. Scholars have theorized neoliberalism, so far as I understand it in the several disciplinary literatures I’ve studied, as “the market, yes”—meaning that what was once ‘public’ gets turned over into ‘private’ hands.

But this movement from public to private manifests in different ways at different times for different contexts. The neoliberal descriptor gets affixed to mental states, structures, policies, practices, intentions, unintentional outcomes, and other entities.

At first, it seems, neoliberalization occurred in the dismantling of more social democratic bodies, at once decentralizing, defunding, and disempowering structures that were accountable to voting and labor organizing patterns of majorities. This movement turned over financial, juridical, and political power to leaders of private firms. There was austerity for the many via the slashing of programs and their tax revenues and, as Melinda Cooper has argued recently, extravagance for the rich via the creative tax expenditure policies, always favoring the supply side.

Okay. Fine. I bought into this concept in graduate school and I’ve been content with it. The neoliberal thesis does much to explain the shifts in public education in the United States, but also elsewhere.

But for some reason, as we sat down to lunch at the start of the walking tour in Marseille, where the French government had taken the unique step of favoring Marseille’s municipality with direct grants and loan guarantees for more than a billion euros to fix up their schools, the latter of which were coming from the European Investment Bank, an international development arm of the European Union, I just had to wonder: does the neoliberal thesis really hold up if we use it for this too? At what point does it stretch so far as to become conceptually thin?

Of course, Virginie and Aude-lide made the argument, pretty convincing, that the development of Marseille’s urban landscape according to displacement of diverse working class communities already settled there, a vision more in tune with the Disneyfication of much of Paris’s city center—something New York City has seen too—where the hope is that there’ll be expensive storefronts with pricey commodities, luxury tourism, flashy restaurants with overpriced bland food, and all manner of travelers gawking…rather than, say, a robust and nourishing conurbation for everyone living in Marseille. That all sounds neoliberal, right?

But for some reason at lunch I wasn’t happy. Maybe I was super hungry or something but I couldn’t let it go. What exactly is neoliberalism? What are ‘public’ and ‘private’ really supposed to mean? If neoliberalism, in the case of schools, can mean both the decentralization of state involvement and the centralization of that involvement; if it can mean the removal of public financing and the increase of public financing; if it can mean both the destruction of a system of public provision and it’s reconstruction—seriously, what’s neoliberal?

The geographers at the table found this endlessly annoying, as did one of the critical education scholars. They said my question was reductive, that there are many forms of neoliberalism (early, zombie, crony, ordo…). They said, following Jamie Peck, that it has no essence. Neoliberalism just adapts and manifests. They said that it’s really just capitalism. They said it’s a periodization thing, more about the dialectical movements and moments of the postwar period.

I could feel my philosopher bile rising. None of these lines held up against the kind of (admittedly knee-jerk) Socratic tests I posed to them as we waited for our food. In each case, we could produce examples where contradictory events and arrangements qualified, somehow, as neoliberal, such that the term became a catch-all for whatever felt apt for critique. I knew I was being annoying, but I also knew the food was taking a long time to come and that this would be distracting, so I kept at it, to the apparent chagrin of my colleagues.

The food came, moods improved, and after we ate someone made what would become a kind of running joke on the walking tour. Pointing to a development project across the street, they said “now that’s neoliberal, Dave!” I said okay okay, fine, but when pressed, I admitted that while I felt better after having eaten, I wasn’t convinced, philosophically, that the concept of neoliberalism was holding the conjunctural water it was meant to, that at some point the purview of the ‘public vs. private’ distinction was bound to break down (or already had!) and, ultimately, the entire neoliberal problematic might be unhelpful for movements pushing for justice and transformation.

I searched around for cases of initiatives that weren’t neoliberal. Some aspects of Bidenism were thought to be post-neoliberal, specifically the combination of the CHIPS act and the Inflation Reduction Act. Maybe the capitalization of the green bank wasn’t neoliberal? But green banks are neoliberal because they use private money! someone might say. Maybe the direct pay tax credits aren’t neoliberal? But they just funnel money into private coffers and don’t have any sticks to hit back against big finance! someone might say.

Then I thought about Bill de Blasio’s universal pre-k in New York City, a program from which I’d personally benefited, where our daughter attended free city 3k and 4k along with diverse working class students and even some ruling class students. That couldn’t be neoliberal, could it? My colleagues agreed.

But then I thought about it: the program funnels city money into private operators’ hands. Most if not all pre-k establishments are privately owned. They get city money to subsidize the kids’ seats, which then pays for most of the materials, but those workers aren’t unionized. They’re not covered by the same protections as other city workers. They’re not part of the city’s government, per se, they’re just funded by it. So is that neoliberal?

Maybe the most clearly non-neoliberal thing is the current neofascism. A federal police force kidnapping people, killing them in the streets, going door to door, disappearing people to camps across the landscape, constructed for the purpose, flying them out of the country, subjecting them to torture. Is that neoliberal?

I think some might say…yes.