Benjamin R. Barber, a political theorist whose 1995 book, “Jihad vs. McWorld,” presciently analyzed the socioeconomic forces leading to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and a surge in tribalism around the world, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 77.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, said his son, Jeremy.
Mr. Barber was an academic and public intellectual who argued, with missionary zeal, the virtues of decentralized democracy, or “unmediated self-government by an engaged citizenry,” as he once wrote.
In books like “Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age” (1984) and “The Conquest of Politics: Liberal Philosophy in Democratic Times” (1988), he outlined the ways that ordinary citizens might assume a more powerful role in shaping their lives through local, communal institutions — a network of “public spaces” encouraging interconnectedness and citizen involvement in politics.
His cause gained urgency with the rise of globalization and the growing resentment of traditional societies against the secular, consumerist values of Western capitalism. The nation-dissolving forces of information technology and global markets were on a collision course, he argued, with resurgent religious fundamentalism and parochial loyalties deriving from blood and soil.
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“If we export capitalism without democracy, we breed anarchy and terrorism,” Mr. Barber told The Washington Post after the Sept. 11 attacks, an event that seemed to confer prophetic status on “Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World” and propelled it onto best-seller lists.
“I said precisely that the war of Jihad versus McWorld, if it was not alleviated by global democracy, an international civic infrastructure, was likely to explode,” he told The Post. “These two sets of forces could not avoid clashing and exploding; they were going to create nothing but death and explosion unless we did this third thing, and we didn’t.”
Benjamin Reynolds Barber was born Aug. 2, 1939, in Manhattan. His father, Philip, succeeded Elmer Rice as the director of the New York unit of the Federal Theater Project. His mother, Doris Frankel, was a playwright who wrote for the radio soap opera “Ma Perkins” and later for the television soap operas “All My Children” and “General Hospital.”
He grew up in Greenwich Village and attended the Stockbridge School, a progressive boarding school in Massachusetts founded in the late 1940s by Hans Maeder, a German socialist refugee. After a year studying at the Albert Schweitzer College in Churwalden, Switzerland, he enrolled at Grinnell College in Iowa. On his way to earning a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1960, he studied for a year at the London School of Economics.
At Harvard, he was awarded a master’s degree in government in 1963 and a doctorate in 1966. In 1969, he began teaching political science at Rutgers, where for many years he was the director of the Walt Whitman Center for the Culture and Politics of Democracy. In 2001, he joined the University of Maryland as the Kekst Professor of Civil Society.
Mr. Barber juggled his academic appointments with a variety of posts at think tanks and public-policy organizations, notably at the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and at Demos, a research and policy organization promoting participatory democracy and an enlightened public sector. In 1974, he helped found the journal Political Theory, which he edited for the next decade.
“I went into the academic world under the illusion that it was a place where people cared passionately about ideas, about teaching, about discourse and about reflecting critically,” he told The Post. “What I discovered was a world of small-minded, partisan professionals, many of whom were there because they couldn’t figure out what else to do. So I created a life inside the academy that reflected the life I wanted to lead.”
He served as an informal adviser to President Bill Clinton, a less than satisfying experience that he wrote about in “The Truth of Power: Intellectual Affairs in the Clinton White House” (2001).
After the Sept. 11 attacks, he returned to the subject of the West and its enemies in “Fear’s Empire: War, Terrorism and Democracy” (2003), arguing that the current crisis presented only two options: “to overpower the malevolent interdependence that is terrorism by somehow imposing a global pax rooted in force; or to forge a benevolent interdependence by democratizing the world.”
Mr. Barber’s first marriage ended in divorce. In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife, the former Leah Kreutzer; two daughters, Cornelia Witte Barber and Rebecca Barber; a brother, Willson; two half brothers, Charles and Hilary; and six grandchildren.
Mr. Barber, in his later writing, promoted cities as solution generators for pressing world problems, their size and flexibility allowing them to generate and implement ideas more creatively than national governments. Acting on one of his own suggestions in “If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities” (2014), he founded the Global Parliament of Mayors, which convened for the first time last year in The Hague. It was attended by mayors from 60 cities around the world.
His book “Cool Cities: Urban Sovereignty and the Fix for Global Warming” was published last week by Yale University Press.
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