Over at The Nation John Nichols has a nice write-up about scholar Benjamin Barber, who died today at 77, so I won’t repeat everything he says there. Just go read the Nichols’ tribute, or better yet, pull out one of Ben’s books and revisit his ideas, which were almost always people-centered.
Benjamin Barber, who has died at 77, was an agile, adventurous, and enthusiastic scholar who believed that big ideas were needed to address big challenges. So he thought those big ideas, wrote groundbreaking books to put them in context, and formed movements to advance them.
I first encountered Barber’s work in the mid-80s, when his monumental Strong Democracy (1984) became something of a bible for people studying and working to promote civic engagement. He was very visible in academic and public settings, and that’s when I first met him.
We were fortunate to host Ben a couple times here in Arizona as the state drifted further and further into charter school hell, a trend that’s only gotten worse. His 1992 book, An Aristocracy of Everyone, argued the opposite—that public education is a key responsibility of government. In one of his essays written for Arizona officials, he put it simply: If we can’t do education as a public, what the fuck can we do?
A few years later, in 1995, Barber published his prescient Jihad vs. McWorld, which foresaw and explained the upcoming war between fundamentalists, whether capitalistic or religious. As Nichols writes,
Following the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Barber (whose 1995 book Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World became required reading in that period) joined a global group of intellectuals, political leaders, and artists in issuing a “Declaration of Interdependence” that recognized “our responsibilities to the common goods and liberties of humankind as a whole” ...
Ben Barber not only wrote important stuff, he worked! He’s an author and professor really deserving of the moniker “public intellectual.” He wrote about the public, he served the public—bold ideas championed and put to work. RIP Benjamin Barber, good guy.