Critical Exchange Benjamin Barber and the Practice of Political Theory

Richard Battistoni Providence College, Providence, RI 02918, USA [email protected]

Mark B. Brown California State University, Sacramento, CA 95819, USA [email protected]

John Dedrick The Kettering Foundation, Dayton, OH 45459, USA [email protected]

Lisa Disch University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA [email protected]

Jennet Kirkpatrick Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA [email protected]

Jane Mansbridge John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA [email protected]

Contemporary Political Theory (2018) 17, 478–510. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296- 018-0226-3; published online 15 May 2018

The realm of politics invites cynicism, but it always engenders hope…Politics at its best allows us to decide together as citizens how to undo the inadvertent common effects of all that we do one by one as consumers and producers, or what we do when private interests and prejudice seize the institutions of the state to try to undo public goods. It is the arena where public goods can trump private interests, where the commonwealth can become a measure of higher

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purposes and the mirror of public values. But politics is hardly at its best right now, and [t]he weakness of politics undermines democracy—the faith behind politics. —Benjamin R. Barber (2017, pp. 7–8) Benjamin Reynolds Barber died on April 24, 2017 after a battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 77 years old, survived by his wife Leah, three children, and six grandchildren. His work and his legacy span a range of activities and publications that bear witness to a remarkable journey of invention and reinvention. He is probably best known for two very different, very powerful books: Strong Democracy and Jihad vs. McWorld. Strong Democracy, which receives extensive examination in many of the essays that follow, established Barber’s pre-eminence as a theorist and advocate for a more participatory democracy, as well as his ability to understand the centrality of talk – and of ‘‘eloquent listening’’ (Langston Hughes’ term) – to democratic communities. Jihad vs. McWorld, a much more controversial work, nonetheless raised important questions about the threats to democracy from global capitalism and the fundamentalist, tribalist response to globalization, a full six years prior to the events of September 11, 2001. Both works were prescient. One divined the wellsprings of civic interaction that would flourish with the popularization of the internet and invention of social media platforms. The other sensed the resentments brewing in an increasingly interconnected, increasingly inegalitarian world. Throughout his life, Barber wrote and spoke in response to different events and challenges of the times: the anarchism of the sixties; the threat of terrorism; the irrelevance of higher education; the dangers of consumer capitalism; the existential threat of climate change; and the election of Donald Trump. He wrote books of scholarly political theory, of course, but he also penned journalistic analyses and newspaper op-eds, authored plays and operatic librettos, gave campus lectures and TED talks, was interviewed by radio, television, and internet talk show hosts, served as keynote speaker at countless national and international conferences and conventions, conducted workshops and trainings, convened and organized events and social movements, and advised presidents, mayors, and other prominent public officials, as well as outsider political campaigns like those of Bill Bradley and Fred Harris. He sought to stimulate people’s thinking and change their minds, but he also wanted to get things done and change the world. He kept up this breathtaking pace as a political theorist, public intellectual, agitator, and activist up to the very end of his life. His book, Cool Cities: Urban Sovereignty and the Fix for Global Warming, from which the epigraph above is taken, was published by Yale University Press the week before he passed away. He convened the inaugural meeting of the Global Parliament of Mayors, an organization he founded in 2015, just months before he died. His influence was no less as a teacher, as the contributing authors in this volume and countless others can attest. After spending a few years on the faculty at the

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University of Pennsylvania, Barber arrived at Rutgers University in 1969, where he would spend the next 32 years teaching, researching, and writing. During this time, graduate study in political theory reached a position of prominence at the university, with as many as seven distinguished theorists on the Rutgers faculty at any given time, including Stephen Bronner, Sebastian de Grazia, Carey McWil- liams, Gordon Schochet, and Linda Zerilli. Barber’s influence was unique, not only because he supervised a great number of doctoral dissertations, but also because he advised students who represented a wide range of approaches to politics: liberals and libertarians; Marxists and Straussians; feminists and globalists – all perspec- tives that he treated to withering critiques in his own publications. Very few students, if any, reflected Barber’s own preferences for participatory democracy. His students wrote scholarly analyses of classical and contemporary thinkers in the political theory ‘‘canon,’’ but also took on the public role of the arts, media, and the family, and addressed issues of educational and environmental policy. He believed in the autonomy of those with whom he worked, and he respected his students whether they agreed or disagreed with his own methodological or theoretical positions, and whether or not they took the directions he encouraged after graduating. As a result, Barber’s students were not disciples or acolytes, and do not form a distinctive ‘‘Barberian school’’ of political theory. When he ‘‘retired’’ from Rutgers, he went on to teach and do research at the University of Maryland and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He also served a long stint as a Distinguished Senior Scholar at the think tank Demos. With all of these varied achievements and life pathways, there is one word that may best capture the essence of his life’s work and legacy: citizen. In all of his work, and throughout his life, Barber was a fierce defender and advocate of democracy (with the smallest of d’s). His own background and demeanor may have suggested an aristocratic elitism, but Ben truly was a man of the people. While he hobnobbed with celebrities in the political and entertainment world, he also enjoyed interactions with everyday folks on the street, and he deeply admired the extraordinary ingenuity and creativity that existed in all communities. In our contemporary world, where democracy is being chipped away in practice and assailed in theory, this exchange examining the roots and branches of Barber’s democratic political theory could not come at a better time. The contributions to this Critical Exchange provide portraits or snapshots of Benjamin Barber as an activist, advisor, and colleague. They offer critical reflections on the meanings, insights, and importance of a variety of his texts. The six authors who have contributed pieces knew Ben well: the opening essay by Jane Mansbridge recounts an initial meeting with him dating back almost sixty years, and the other five worked closely with him in graduate school and beyond. The contributions collected here offer all of us the opportunity to celebrate Barber’s life and legacy, and at the same time invite us to ask important questions about ‘‘the nature of politics’’ (actually the title of an introductory undergraduate course

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Barber often taught at Rutgers), the foundations and practical manifestations of democracy, and the role of political theorists in drawing attention to the existential challenges in contemporary public life. Richard Battistoni

The strong voice of Benjamin Barber

Benjamin Barber’s voice will live on. His intelligence, immersion in political practice, and empathy for humankind ensure that his books will be read centuries from now – at least if the human race manages not to destroy itself in that time. His continuing political activism honed his understanding of practice. His playwriting – and his continual intense engagement with fellow-thinkers and dissenters alike – honed his understanding of humanity. I first encountered Benjamin R. Barber as Ben the activist. In 1960, he helped me, a complete political neophyte, organize a disarmament group at my college. Tocsin, the group Ben was involved with at Harvard, had been organizing and putting out materials on disarmament. My boyfriend and later husband, Owen de Long, Ben’s friend, introduced me to the issue and gradually overcame my incredulity at the idea. Once I had become convinced that we had the nuclear capacity to destroy the planet and might actually use that capacity, Ben coached me over the phone on how to get an audience for discussing disarmament at the college: invite to a debate a much-adored professor who disagreed strongly with the very idea. I found Richard Rorty, long before his national fame. Students filled the dining hall at one of the houses. As a shy young girl, I was not great at the debate, but had facts and figures at my disposal that the audience had never heard, and I may have made up in sincerity and shock value for what I lacked in oratorical skill. Ben, who traveled out to the college for the debate, cheerily told me I did fine. He then provided advice on how to organize a protest. A group of us soon travelled to a local bomb shelter with our homemade signs. Later, as the ‘‘sixties’’ evolved, Ben and I both became involved in issues of participatory democracy. I was more tempted by the thoughts of anarchists than he was – he struck out mightily against them in Superman and Common Men: Freedom, Anarchy, and the Revolution,(1971) – but we both believed, with many of our time, that, in the words of the Port Huron Statement, society should be ‘‘organized not for minority, but for majority, participation in decision-making’’ and ‘‘that the individual [should] share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life’’ (1962). Ben was preeminently a scholar of participatory democracy, from his first days till his last. His thought on the subject was usually subtle, informed by practice, and far-seeing. His ideal was, quite simply, a government in which ‘‘all of the people govern themselves in at least some public matters at least some of the time’’ (Barber, 1984, p. xiv). In Strong Democracy he explained how this ideal was

Ó 2018 Macmillan Publishers Ltd., part of Springer Nature. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 17, 4, 478–510 481 Critical Exchange possible, why we have never practiced it, and what conceptual and practical innovations might make it work.1 Ben’s early work had, in my view, one major weakness: a virulent animus against representation. His PhD thesis on the canton of Graubu¨nden in Switzerland became his first book, The Death of Communal Liberty: A History of Freedom in a Swiss Mountain Canton (1974). The book concludes with two photographs, one captioned simply ‘‘Direct Democracy’’ and the other ‘‘Representative Democracy.’’ The photograph of Direct Democracy depicts a male citizen of a Swiss commune, in the workingman’s garb of printed shirt rolled up at the sleeves and woolen vest, shot from below so that head and upper torso are outlined almost with a glow against the snow-capped mountains in the background. He stands outdoors in the yearly assembly, surrounded by other male citizens, with the banner of the commune flying in the background.2 The photograph of Representative Democracy depicts two male uniformed officers subduing a male citizen with many other male citizens standing around, perhaps at an assembly of some kind, perhaps at a protest (p. 275). The photographs end the book, unaccompanied by explanation, the meaning intended to be self-evident. In Strong Democracy, ten years later, Ben wrote bluntly that ‘‘the representative principle steals from individuals the ultimate responsibility for their values, beliefs, and actions’’ (p. 145). It is ‘‘incompatible with freedom’’ (p. 146). It ‘‘precludes the evolution of a participating public in which the idea of justice might take root’’ (p. 146). Nowhere in the book did he qualify the words ‘‘steals,’’ ‘‘incompatible,’’ and ‘‘precludes.’’ He wrote no aside granting that every citizen wants and needs representation for some purposes at some times, or that the citizens who participate in a direct assembly may be thought to represent informally those who do not attend. He gave no hint of the kinds of public talk that both the representatives and the process of election encourage. Yet the virulence of Ben’s enmity for representation came coupled with such a loving embrace of direct participation that he uncovered in that participation depths that others failed to see. I will touch briefly on only two: the interwoven analyses in Strong Democracy of listening and the relation of common and conflicting interests. Writing in 1984 of ‘‘strong democratic talk,’’ he presaged much of what would come later in the analysis of deliberative democracy. ‘‘At the heart of strong democracy is talk,’’ Ben wrote, and then defined strong democratic talk as ‘‘listening no less than speaking’’ (pp. 173–174). That talk is embedded in decision, action, and common work. In Strong Democracy the words ‘‘deliberate’’ and ‘‘deliberation’’ rarely occur alone, unmingled with other features of strong democracy. So in strong democracy ‘‘citizens deliberate…engage, share, and contribute’’ (p. 155) and the process of self-legislation requires a ‘‘never- ending process of deliberation, decision, and action’’ (p. 151). In Ben’s analysis, political talk encompasses the more emotionally laden activities of ‘‘exploring mutuality’’ and the search for ‘‘affiliation and affection.’’ He recognized that words need not have ‘‘rational’’ content to bind people together.

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In strong democratic talk, he wrote, ‘‘deliberation (airing choices), bargaining (exchanging benefits) and decision-making (choosing goals) are complemented by the more complex, open-ended art of conversation’’ (p. 183). Such conversation could include the everyday: ‘‘two neighbors talking for the first time over a fence,’’ whose goal is ‘‘only a ‘getting to know you’ and thereby ‘getting to know us’’’ (p. 184). The playwright in Ben saw that strong democratic talk has the ‘‘potential for emotive expression, musical utterance, inflection, feeling, ritual, and symbolism (or myth)’’ (p. 186). It is ‘‘through tone, color, volume, and inflection that we feel, affect, and touch each other,’’ often through talk ‘‘peppered with ritual speech: greetings and goodbyes, and incantations, exclamations and expletives’’ (p. 187; see also p. 176 on ‘‘the affective as well as the cognitive mode’’ in strong democratic talk). Later Lynn Sanders added to Ben’s ‘‘witness and self- expression,’’ her ‘‘testimony’’ and telling ‘‘stories’’ (Sanders, 1997, pp. 351–371), while Iris Marion Young elaborated his ‘‘greetings and goodbyes’’ (giving her examples of ‘‘‘Good morning,’ ‘How are you,’ ‘Welcome,’ ‘See you later,’ ‘Take care’’’), along with ‘‘forms of speech that often lubricate ongoing discussion with mild forms of flattery, stroking of egos, and deference’’ (Young, 1996, p. 129). On the role of informal talk, Ben pointed out in Strong Democracy that ‘‘world leaders meeting at a summit will frequently devote an initial session to getting to know one another in very much this fashion, before they get down to the business of bargaining and exchange’’ (p. 184). Today in Congress such informal meetings occur far less often than in the past, to the regret of many older and former members, even as negotiation experts point out how important such moments are for allowing parties to a negotiation to come to understand each other’s interests better and reach ‘‘integrative’’ solutions (Follett, 1942 [1925]; Walton and McKersie, 1965; Fisher and Ury, 1991; Mansbridge and Latura, 2017). Ben always stressed listening for commonality, but did not downplay the importance of conflict. It is true that he wrote of listening as a ‘‘mutualistic art’’ in which ‘‘[t]he empathetic listener becomes more like his interlocutor as the two bridge the differences between them by conversation and mutual understanding.’’ Even silence becomes that ‘‘precious medium in which reflection is ruptured and empathy can grow’’ (p. 175). Ben’s ‘‘empathetic listener,’’ emphasizes bridging differences and growing more like one another, but does not assume either that commonality is pre-given or that it necessarily can be forged. Consider this much-cited sentence from Strong Democracy, on the process of strong democratic talk: ‘‘I will put myself in his place, I will try to understand, I will strain to hear what makes us alike, I will listen for a common rhetoric evocative of a common purpose or a common good’’ (p. 175).3 The word ‘‘common’’ appears three times in the last eleven words and can appear to dominate the sentence’s entire meaning. Yet the sentence needs two glosses. First, Ben uses ‘‘try,’’ underscored by ‘‘strain to,’’ to remind his readers how hard it is to put oneself in another’s place. So too Adam Smith (1759) made sympathy the basis of

Ó 2018 Macmillan Publishers Ltd., part of Springer Nature. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 17, 4, 478–510 483 Critical Exchange his theory of morality, but observed as well that because ‘‘we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation’’ (p. 11). Bernard Williams argued that ‘‘each man is owed an effort at identification’’ (1969, p. 41). Andre´ Ba¨chtiger and Dominik Hangartner described the ‘‘effort to appreciate the moral force of the position of people with whom we disagree’’ (2010, p. 619). Robert Goodin described ‘‘imagining yourself in the place of another, for purposes of trying to understand what the other is saying’’ (2008, p. 42). These words all recognize the difficulty, perhaps the impossibility, given our ineradicable differences, of putting ourselves in another’s position. Second, Ben explicitly condemned any ‘‘unitary’’ institution that ‘‘‘wills’ away conflict.’’ In contrast to the many deliberative theories that denounce self-interest and bargaining (e.g., Habermas, 1962; Cohen, 1989; Sunstein, 1988), Ben’s strong democratic talk readily accommodates ongoing conflicts in interests. In his list of the nine functions of strong democratic talk, he placed articulating interests and bargaining at the top:

The articulation of interests; bargaining; and exchange Persuasion Agenda-setting Exploring mutuality Affiliation and affection Maintaining autonomy Witness and self-expression Reformulation and reconceptualization Community-building as the creation of public interests, common goods, and active citizens (Barber, 1984, pp. 178–179)

In rereading Strong Democracy recently I was surprised to see how many items on this list we have claimed since then as ‘‘innovations’’ in deliberative theory (see e.g., Mansbridge et al., 2010; Warren et al., 2016;Ba¨chtiger et al., 2018). By placing the cluster composing the articulation of interests, bargaining, and exchange first in this list, Ben made clear that this cluster is not just one of the aspects of strong democratic talk but an important aspect. Although he wanted to include this aspect in democratic talk, he opposed ‘‘reducing talk’’ to this aspect. Such a reduction, he argued, ‘‘creates a climate hostile to the affective uses of talk and invulnerable to the subtle claims of mutualism.’’ In Ben’s work, self-interest is acceptable, whereas acting ‘‘exclusively out of self-interest’’ is not (p. 179). Ben’s strong voice echoes through the list of possible participatory reforms at the end of Strong Democracy. He proposed myriad forms of ‘‘common work and common doing’’ – collectively creating pocket parks, urban farms, storefront community-education centers, neighborhood skill teams, crime-watch units, and

484 Ó 2018 Macmillan Publishers Ltd., part of Springer Nature. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 17, 4, 478–510 Critical Exchange universal citizen service. He proposed neighborhood assemblies (for 5000–25,000 citizens) that could deliberate, vent grievances, act as ombuds advocates, and perhaps form part of a referendum process. He proposed representative town meetings, office holding by lot, and handling small offenses through new forms of lay justice. He proposed a national initiative and referendum process, including (1) a mandatory tie-in with neighborhood assemblies and interactive-television town meetings, (2) a multi-choice referendum format (in which citizens would have a choice, for example, among ‘‘support strongly,’’ ‘‘support but with a specified objection,’’ ‘‘oppose strongly,’’ ‘‘oppose the proposal, but not the principle behind it,’’ and other options), and (3) a two-stage voting process with space between for citizen talk and reflection. He proposed universal citizen service, neighborhood action programs, workplace democracy, and programs for redesigning public space. We need to remember these proposals. We need to remember Ben’s subtlety regarding commonality and conflict. We need to remember the depth of his insights on listening. Above all, we need to keep with us his voice, resonating with the nuance of theory, the urgency of practice, and the warmth of humanity. Jane Mansbridge

Remembering Benjamin R. Barber

Benjamin R. Barber was first and foremost a democrat. He was also a prolific writer, public speaker, playwright, political scientist, editor, movement activist, and teacher who made the theory and practice of the culture and politics of democracy the center of his life’s work. He was both an internationally renowned public intellectual and someone who remained deeply committed to community and grounded in community life. These two roles were more than complementary for him; they were essential to his calling as a democrat. In this reflection, I take up Barber’s work as a public intellectual and the significance for practitioners of his most influential philosophical book, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (1984). Barber had a profoundly intuitive sense of our dependence on communities and our obligations to them. He believed that substantive liberty depends ultimately on the democratic functioning of communities. Whatever our individual occupations, community must be our shared concern if we are to be free. As he commented on a public radio interview with Scott London shortly after the publication of An Aristocracy of Everyone (1992), ‘‘Democracy is a form of community…I want to start with the simple acknowledgement that whether we like it or not we are embedded beings, are communal beings, which means nothing more than saying that we live in families, we live in neighborhoods, we go to churches, we go to schools, with other people’’ (London, 1992). Barber ‘‘walked the talk.’’ Community mattered deeply to him, and until his very last days he was taking calls from the

Ó 2018 Macmillan Publishers Ltd., part of Springer Nature. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 17, 4, 478–510 485 Critical Exchange mayors whom he had organized as a Global Parliament of Mayors for the purpose of bringing the unique capacities of cities to bear on profound moral and human problems, such as climate change (GlobalParliament.org; Barber, 2013, 2017). Barber was a public intellectual. This was his vocation as well as a kind of craft – a form of democratic art – to which he devoted a lifetime of tireless work. The term ‘‘public intellectual’’ is sometimes used in a casual way to mean an academician or other professional who popularizes or translates research for the lay public in the press, open lectures, or broadcast and digital media (Mitchell, 2017). As Russell Jacoby defined the term he had earlier used in his book The Last Intellectual (1987), ‘‘I meant roughly an intellectual who uses the vernacular and writes for more than specialists, an intellectual who remains committed to a public’’ (Jacoby, 2000, p. 40). This is important work with clear public benefit. Translations of hypotheses from the cognitive sciences can help us better understand why ‘‘nudges’’ work, as Thaler and Sunstein (2009) point out in their book, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. The retelling of American history provides communities with strategic facts about the confederate monuments that can help citizens make sense of what is really at stake in the debates over their removal (e.g., AHA, 2017; AHA Historians and Confederate Monument Debate, 2018; Kauffman, 2018.) But there is something more to be said about being a public intellectual. The work is not primarily the popularization or translation of scholarship into lay terms; it is rather a craft of advancing dialogues and deliberations that help to set the terms by which people become a public through their collective actions. This work is reciprocal and it is quintessentially democratic. Jim Veninga and Noe¨lle McAfee (1997) argue that public intellectuals ‘‘stand with the public.’’ Or in Robert Kingston’s words, they are participating with citizens in ‘‘sharinga burden’’with which they all struggle (Brown, 2004). Riffing off a community organizing adage, one might say that public intellectuals are ‘‘on tap’’ rather than ‘‘on top’’ in the public life of our democracy. Barber had a way of anticipating the major trends and large questions that confront democracy. It was one of his gifts. He always seemed to be at least one step ahead of the rest of us. But he was always with communities, theorizing not for them but with them. It was a necessary dialectic for him. ‘‘Anyone who spends a little time at Zuccotti Park [a site taken over by Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protestors in 2011],’’ Barber wrote in The Huffington Post, ‘‘quickly learns that those who occupy Wall Street share more than the unifying conviction that money has undone the social compact…they share something more precious: a belief that what democracy really is cannot be defined by how it is being practiced today…To understand what’s going on, look at what OWS is, not what it does’’ (Barber, 2011). I would even hypothesize that it was the sustained engagement with communities that gave shape to Barber’s insights and somehow provided him with the ability to see farther down the road than many of us. Consider:

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The critique of the elitism and anti-democratic tendencies of certain elements of the counterculture in his first book, Superman and Common Men, anticipated the culture wars (Barber, 1971). The democratic reframing of ‘‘globalization’’ in Jihad Versus McWorld antici- pated the dynamics of political crises of our times (Barber, 1995a). If Mayors Ruled the World (2013) and Cool Cities (2017) anticipated a crisis of democratic legitimacy for nation-states in a world that is globalized and warming. Barber cautions: By failing to protect us from climate change, nation-states have reneged on their end of the bargain. Their inability to assure sustainability constitutes a default of sovereignty that both permits and demands action from alternative authoritative bodies: in our situation today, from regional and municipal authorities who assume responsibility for sustainability. If states can’t or won’t assure sustainability, cities must (Barber, 2017, p. 19).

But Barber did not just offer diagnoses; he also worked toward remedies. He argued that cities may be the only units of government capable of developing a democratic response to these problems, and so he founded the Global Parliament of Mayors as noted above. Earlier, following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Barber had been instrumental in establishing the Interdependence Movement and an annual Interdependence Day on September 12 to seek alternatives to terrorism and celebrate our global interdependence. Somehow in Barber’s company no project seemed too large. A related dialectic between theory and practice was at play in Barber’s pioneering work on civic education at Rutgers University (Barber, 1989; Barber, 1992; Barber and Battistoni, 2011). It also characterized his work in the Reinventing Citizenship Project with the White House Domestic Policy Council (Boyte and Barber, 1994; Barber, 2001; Sirianni and Friedland, 2001; Boyte, 2004). The Reinventing Citizenship Project provided the context for Barber to make a case for reclaiming the category of ‘‘civil society’’ for democratic politics. A Place for Us (Barber, 1998a) started as a paper shared with the New Citizenship working group titled ‘‘An American Civic Forum: Re-illuminating Public Space for a Civil Society in Eclipse’’ (Barber, mss. Nd; see also, Barber, 1995b). It is important to note that Barber was consistently supportive of roles that economic markets and norms play in democracy when they are checked by democratic institutions. While he was a vocal critic of ‘‘unbridled capitalism’’ he was not anti-capitalist. In fact, he could be a pretty shrewd businessman. In a 2007 PBS interview with Bill Moyers following the publication of Barber’s book, Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole (2007), he said, ‘‘We live in a world where there are real needs and real want and there is no reason why capitalism should not be addressing these real

Ó 2018 Macmillan Publishers Ltd., part of Springer Nature. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 17, 4, 478–510 487 Critical Exchange needs and these real wants’’ (Moyers, 2007). But instead of focusing on long-term investment and meeting real needs and wants, consumer capitalism manufactures wants and needs that our democracy and our planet cannot sustain. Writing in the Kettering Review on the same issues, Barber argued that consumer capitalism ‘‘generates an ethos of schizophrenia that helps condition the attitudes and behaviors it requires for its own survival. Hence, it fosters ‘me’ thinking on the model of the narcissistic child and discourages ‘we’ thinking of the kind deliberative ‘grown-up’ citizens prefer’’ (2006, pp. 16–17). In brief, consumer capitalism privatizes citizenship and threatens democratic freedom. Finally, I will mention Barber’s framing of a fresh understanding of democracy and the citizen’s role in it in Strong Democracy (1984). It was in the early 1980s, when a new president said to the nation, ‘‘In this present crisis, government is not the solution to the problem; it is the problem’’ (Reagan, 1981). It was a time when the nation was still healing from the turbulent ‘70s. Unemployment, environmental protection, and inadequately performing schools were among a host of challenges that seemed to defy expert solutions. We were A Nation at Risk (U.S. National Commission on Education, 1983). This, roughly, was the context in which Barber wrote Strong Democracy. Barber’s scholarly contributions to making the case for strong democracy are well known and foundational among democratic theorists, and are discussed by other contributors to this exchange. But why does Strong Democracy matter from a practitioner’s perspective? First, Strong Democracy offers an alternative frame for understanding the possibilities of democratic politics. The radical shift Barber proposes is one that moves citizens from the political sidelines as bearers of rights, consumers, and clients, to a place at the very center of the nation’s politics as actors and agents. Significant elements of this emerging citizen-centered paradigm are now shared widely by people working on questions of civic renewal (Levine, 2013, Sirianni and Friedland, 2001, 2005; Morse, 2014), ‘‘public work’’ (Boyte and Kari, 1996; Boyte, 2004; Boyte et al, 2018), collaborative governance (Kemmis and McKinney, 2011), public dialogue and conflict resolution (Saunders, 2005), and deliberative democracy (Black et al, 2014; Gibson, 2006; Mathews, 1994, 2014; Gastil and Levine, 2005; Leighninger, 2006; Lukensmeyer, 2013; NCDD.org; DDC.org; Everydaydemocracy.org). Second, Strong Democracy provides an entree for a revival of pragmatism in democratic politics. As Barber writes, ‘‘One can understand the realm of politics as being circumscribed by conditions that impose the ‘‘necessity for public action, and thus for reasonable public choice, in the presence of conflict and the absence of private or independent grounds for judgment’’ (Barber, 1984, p. 120, emphasis in original). Placing citizens at the center of politics is not merely instrumental; it is an absolute requirement if we are to deal constructively with moral conflicts in a world without agreed-upon moral foundations (see e.g., Mathews, 2014).

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Third, Strong Democracy identifies specific civic skills required for robust citizen participation. For example, Barber’s discussion of ‘‘strong democratic talk’’ has been assimilated and become part of the norms driving much public engagement work. ‘‘Strong democratic talk always involves listening as well as speaking, feeling as well as thinking, and acting as well as reflecting’’ (Barber, 1984, p. 178). Facilitators emphasizing the importance of ‘‘listening’’ as much as ‘‘talking’’ build on Barber’s work (McCoy and Scully, 2002; Melville, Willingham and Dedrick, 2005; NCDD.org; NIFI.org; and EverydayDemocracy.org). Fourth, Strong Democracy presented a number of proposals for institutional innovations, such as teledemocracy-style town meetings and a national service corps or projects to reclaim public spaces in communities. (Barber, 1984, pp. 261–311). Barber invited practitioners to experiment and try out new ways of finding a public voice and organizing for public action. Finally, Strong Democracy makes the case for the centrality of community in our lives and the importance of participation in the full range of the community’s institutions – including its government and schools – as part and parcel of our education for democracy. In a sense, Barber’s focus on community is a gentle reminder of what we already know from experience but seem to have forgotten in a world focused on macro systems and micro phenomena: that democratic politics is rooted in places where people live, work, worship, mourn, and celebrate together. John R. Dedrick

Benjamin R. Barber: The Headstrong Democrat

One question has come up repeatedly about my graduate training at Rutgers University: how did you manage to work with Ben Barber? The way that question is asked is meant to imply that Ben could be difficult, which is true. Dissertation students like me were required to schedule appointments weeks in advance and on the much-anticipated day, Ben would often be delayed, sometimes for hours. Rescheduling was not an option and so we students needed to remain there, outside of his offices, at the ready, because it was never clear when exactly he would be able to see us. Slumping in the gray corridors of Hickman Hall, we waited and waited, finding out eventually that the delay was because Bill Bradley, Howard Dean, or President Bill Clinton had needed to talk to Ben immediately. In meetings Ben could be brusque. I suppose some people might say he did not suffer fools gladly, but the truth is Ben demolished fools gladly. Verbal argumentation was his natural medium and he was a devastating interlocutor. Ben grasped an argument quick as lightning and, streaking through its structure, found the weak points, and strained them until they collapsed from their own internal failures. If the whole argument was knocked to the ground as a result, Ben

Ó 2018 Macmillan Publishers Ltd., part of Springer Nature. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 17, 4, 478–510 489 Critical Exchange did not care. In fact, he may have been glad of it. There was no tolerance on his part for weakness, either in intellectuals or in their arguments. He was unrelenting, exacting, and without pity when it came to intellectual endeavors. And, so the persistent question: why work with such a man? I have already given you part of the answer: Ben was unrelenting, exacting, and without pity when it came to intellectual endeavors. If you wanted your ideas and arguments to get a rigorous examination, you needed to work with Ben. For me, though, the greatest gift that Ben offered was his fearless intellectual nature. He was a freethinking social critic – a daring risk-taker – who positioned himself against conventional thinking time and time again. Ben would fasten onto an orthodox political view and, interrogating it fully, show that it was not as true or as beneficial as one first supposed. Think western liberal democracy is a great political system? Read Strong Democracy and think again. This ambitious and passionate book, re-issued by University of California Press on its 20th anniversary in 2004, opens with some preliminary, throat-clearing praise for its target. Liberal democracy, Barber notes, is one of the sturdiest political systems, and its capacity to stolidly endure political turmoil, especially in America, has made it the modern model of democracy throughout the world. What most readers might expect at this point – a paean to James Madison, the wisdom of Federalist Number 10, or the prescience of the framers of the United States Constitution – never arrives. Instead Strong Democracy insists that we focus on the source of liberal democracy’s dependabil- ity. Where does it come from? Knowing as we do, from Polybius forward, that political regimes are naturally unstable and carry the seeds of their own destruction within them, it is not obvious how liberal democracy avoids this fate. What had to be sacrificed – what had to die – in order to give liberal democracy its enduring life? Barber’s answer was that strong democracy itself was sacrificed. Real self- governance and an engaged, participatory citizenry had been given over to create a fake or ‘‘thin’’ kind of liberal, representative democracy that was a pallid and uninspired substitute. Liberal democracy had many undemocratic impulses according to Barber, but they all stemmed from a central problem of prioritizing individual liberty above all else. Liberal democracy crowned a new sovereign, the individual, who reigned supreme over her own discrete and solitary sphere. Thus, this political system ‘‘is capable of fiercely resisting every assault on the individual – his privacy, his property, his interests, and his rights – but it is far less effective in resisting assaults on community or justice or citizenship or participation’’ (Barber, 1984, p. 4). He insisted that liberal democracy, with its radical individualism and its stolid, boring sort of stability, never outweighed the benefits of genuine self- governance, collective action, and civic participation. Strong Democracy con- fronted readers with an uncomfortable demand: the necessity of dethroning themselves as sovereign individuals. Instituting strong democracy, a genuinely

490 Ó 2018 Macmillan Publishers Ltd., part of Springer Nature. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 17, 4, 478–510 Critical Exchange participatory form of self-governance, would require its own kind of sacrifice. Each and every one of us must voluntarily abdicate individual sovereign power and let go of the dream of isolated control and self-reliance. As appealing as Barber’s vision of participatory democracy was (and remains), the book raised legitimate concerns that the portrayal of strong democracy was too rosy, too optimistic. As Alan Wolfe (1986, p. 89) put it, the ‘‘possibility that strong democracy might unleash the worst in man as well as the best has to be acknowledged.’’ These sorts of concerns – and others – led to the book being read, re-read, praised, castigated, and debated, as the more than 8500 citations of Strong Democracy in scholarly books and articles well attest. In Jihad vs. McWorld, published in 1995, Barber responded to a new wave of exultant praise for liberal democracy prompted by Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man. Fukuyama, seeing the collapse of state communism as a monumental historical moment, argued that liberal democracy marked the end point of humanity’s ideological evolution, and thus it was the final form of human government. While Fukuyama imagined a future of liberal democratic dominance and the peace that would likely flow from it, Barber saw conflict and strife. The contemporary world, he argued, was caught between two inverse trends: McWorld, the universalizing and homogenizing influence of global economic markets and popular culture, and Jihad, the parochial and fragmenting influence of racial, ethnic, and religious allegiances. These two forces were antithetical; antipathy, for one fed and reinforced the other. Jihad (or elsewhere Babel) ‘‘threatened the balkanization of nation-states in which culture is pitted against culture’’ and it was ‘‘against technology, against pop culture, against integrated markets; against modernity itself as well as the future in which modernity issues’’ (Barber, 1995a, p. 4). One result of this dynamic, Barber argued, was that the planet was melding together while at the very same moment it was pulling apart. This epic conflict, bad enough on its own, was made worse because both trends undermined the genuine, participatory democracy of the sort outlined in Strong Democracy. Each trend renounced civil society, subverted democratic citizenship, and compromised civil liberty and democratic institutions. As one critic pointed out, the title of the book really should have been Jihad vs. McWorld vs. Democratic Ideals (Juergensmeyer, 1996, p. 588). In opposition to Fukuyama’s transcendent vision of democracy, Barber argued democracy was under threat by the warfare between homogenizing and fragmenting forces. In his view, history was far from over. Indeed, it threatened to go backwards ‘‘in an atavistic return to medieval politics where local tribes and ambitious emperors together ruled the world entire’’ and democracy was nowhere to be found (Barber, 1995a, p. 7). The uncanny prescience of Jihad vs. McWorld won it many admirers. It was re- issued after 9/11 with a new subtitle, ‘‘Terrorism’s Challenge to Democracy,’’ and a new introduction, in which Barber connected the arguments he made in 1996 to the events of 9/11. The book vexed others. Proponents of liberal, free-market

Ó 2018 Macmillan Publishers Ltd., part of Springer Nature. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 17, 4, 478–510 491 Critical Exchange institutions objected to the denunciation of the capitalistic global economy. Fukuyama (1995, p. 117) disliked the book’s ‘‘snobbish distaste for capitalism.’’ Readers like Mark Juergensmeyer and Fareed Zakaria raised a reasonable concern about the use of jihad, a term which also signifies a sacred struggle within a devout Muslim, to symbolize every centrifugal, tribal, and violent force in the world (Juergensmeyer, 1996; Zakaria, 1996). Juergensmeyer rightly pointed out that some of these centrifugal movements were founded in the name of democracy, not in opposition to it. Seemingly impervious to attack, Barber defended his argument in unequivocal terms. Responding to a critic who offered a full-throated defense of free-market enterprise, he noted that his opponent’s ‘‘penchant for pink baiting assures me that history and ideological conflict are not really over after all’’ (Brus, 1992). Barber’s contrarian streak is present in some of the earliest of his writings. In 1974, when much focus was on the tumults of American democracy, Barber looked to Switzerland in The Death of Communal Liberty, a monograph that began as his dissertation. If you want to understand democracy, he argued, do not look to big, brash America, but rather to some of the oldest and most participatory cantons in Switzerland. Questioning received wisdom from the start, Barber pulled the ultimate anti-Tocquevillian move: he turned to Europe, not America, to understand democracy. Along the way, he noted the ‘‘stunning parochialism’’ of most of the political theory of the day, which relied too heavily on the Anglo-American tradition. Giving a sense of what was to come in the book and, as it turned out, in his career, Barber chafed against the confines of Anglo-American political tradition, noting ‘‘that it is as insular as it is fertile, as narrow as it is long, as dogmatic as it is convincing’’ (Barber, 1974, p. 3). Dislodging the dominant theoretical approach also required examining actual political alternatives, the Swiss cantons, and understanding their history and the development of their political institutions. This was precisely what Barber’s book, which really should have the Tocquevillian title ‘‘Democracy in Switzerland,’’ set out to do. Benjamin R. Barber will be remembered for his many contributions to American intellectual life, to international organizations, and to political science. He wrote eighteen books of political theory. In Cool Cities, published by Yale University Press right before he died, Barber argued that the existential threat of climate change and the inability of nation-states to deal with it demanded a new set of political institutions and arrangements. He urged cities to the fore. Cities, he argued, should form an interdependent global network designed to address the common problem of climate change and citizens should explicitly empower urban leadership to speak on their behalf. Right until the end, Barber was prodding us to think about pressing problems differently and goading us to be better, more engaged citizens. Benjamin R. Barber will be remembered for editing the journal Political Theory for ten years. He will rightly be commemorated, too, for his wide-ranging

492 Ó 2018 Macmillan Publishers Ltd., part of Springer Nature. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 17, 4, 478–510 Critical Exchange intellectual interests in art, theater, dance, and food, as well as for authoring plays and novels, writing for television, penning song lyrics, and even composing a libretto. He will be venerated for a lifetime of awards and honors: he was knighted by the French government; he received the Berlin Prize from the American Academy; and he was honored with the John Dewey Award in 2013. Along with these many accomplishments, I will remember Ben Barber as a lionhearted, even fearless critic. Early on in writing my dissertation, there was one meeting with Ben that I was quite nervous and tense about. On this occasion I dreaded talking with Ben, so much so that I welcomed the wait in Hickman Hall because it deferred what I expected to be a painful and embarrassing discussion. I had been to the American Political Science Association’s annual meeting and presented a chapter of my dissertation. The panelists and the discussant were far more distinguished and learned than I, and, not surprisingly, they found all sorts of flaws with the argument. I was not embarrassed – or at least not too much – about this. As I have said, Ben revered armed intellectual battles and, though he looked coldly on defeat, he also understood that victories came through practice and engagement. I was nervous about telling Ben that the discussant, the panelists, and even the audience seemed to genuinely dislike the argument. My paper aroused a great deal of unaffected antipathy and opposition, so much so that I was convinced that the whole dissertation needed to be rethought. How would I ever get a job? When the time came to talk to Ben, I explained the situation. Trying not to let the crashing waves of disappointment inside me show, I suggested that the framing needed to change. The whole dissertation needed to be rethought. After I had made my speech, I braced for his reaction. Ben was ecstatic. Instead of the criticism I was expecting, there was a barrage of praise. The work, Ben said, was forcing readers to question their assumptions about democracy, and it was getting them to think without banisters. Ben assured me there was no greater sign that the dissertation was on the right track. I should proceed without hesitation. To me, Benjamin R. Barber was a true heir of Socrates. He was a gadfly on the steed of orthodox political life who was not afraid to arouse ire. He never bemoaned the swats that came his way because he perceived these reactions differently from most of us. He understood that swats were good; slings and arrows were even better. These reactions told him he was on to something promising. He was doing the work that he had been given to do as a political theorist. Though I wish that he were here now to continue his work as a whip-smart irritator and pest, he has left it to us: his students, his colleagues, his admirers, his friends, those who knew him personally and those who knew him through his writing. We, who are indebted to Ben Barber for reasons too many to count, owe him this: a commitment to continue his work as an intellectual risk-taker, a firebrand, and the very best kind of political pest. Jennet Kirkpatrick

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Participatory Democracy’s Training Grounds: Benjamin Barber’s Approach to Civic Education and Community Service

There is much I could say about Benjamin Barber – academically, professionally, and personally. He was my teacher and dissertation advisor, and later, a colleague, as we worked together to coordinate a major initiative at Rutgers University. In this essay, however, I want to focus on Barber’s civic education and engagement writings. This element of his work may not be as well known to political theorists and political scientists, especially as he focused on other opportunities for and challenges to democracy in the last fifteen years of his life, but it deserves our attention. I also decided to focus on this aspect of Ben Barber’s legacy because of the extraordinary number of thoughtful comments I received from people working in the field of civic education and engagement after he died. I posted a brief testimonial on social media, and was stunned at the response: I had not realized how many people in this field knew of or were inspired by Barber’s work. The comments ranged from ‘‘this is a great loss to our community’’ to ‘‘Benjamin Barber was a guiding star for many of us engaged in civic education. His voice and presence will be missed.’’ As it turned out, Ben was as admired for his thoughtfulness among practitioners and scholars of civic engagement as he was among his peers in political theory. Realizing this led me to reflect on why that was. The connections between democratic political theory and civic education run long and deep. One of the underlying theoretical and practical foundations of Athenian democracy was paideia, a general education aimed at making citizens better decision makers and judges of arguments made in public spaces. In the modern era, thinkers from Locke to Rousseau, Jefferson to Wollstonecraft, saw important linkages between the development and maintenance of the different political ideals they advocated and a proper education for democratic citizenship, especially among the young. By contrast, contemporary political theory typically pays scant attention to civic education and engagement. In the academy, this field of inquiry and practice tends to be relegated to disciplinary curricula in areas such as communications or education, or to the co-curriculum, rather than being embedded in the discipline of political science, and more specifically, political theory. In fact, when the American Political Science Association attempted to revive its own disciplinary connections to civic education with the publication of Teaching Civic Engagement in 2013, there was a notable absence of political theorists (McCartney et al., 2013). But Benjamin Barber was an exception. His work connecting community service and engagement to a program meant to bolster participatory democracy, and democratic citizenship goes back over thirty years. From the outset, Barber’s thinking provided an important bridge between contemporary democratic political

494 Ó 2018 Macmillan Publishers Ltd., part of Springer Nature. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 17, 4, 478–510 Critical Exchange theory and the real world practice of educating for democratic citizenship. In Strong Democracy, arguably his most important theoretical work, Barber offered a critique of liberal democracy and articulated an alternative conceptual frame: strong democracy (Barber, 1984). Strong democracy was ‘‘politics in the participatory mode where conflict is resolved in the absence of an independent ground through a participatory process of ongoing, proximate self-legislation and the creation of a political community capable of transforming dependent, private individuals into free citizens and partial and private interests into public goods’’ (Barber, 1984, p. 132, emphasis in original). But Barber did not stop there: he argued that realizing – and institutionalizing – a more participatory democratic politics would require a ‘‘convincing modern practice.’’ He devoted the final chapter of Strong Democracy to outlining a series of ten practical reform proposals meant both to move the polity toward a more participatory democratic regime and to allow for a realistic assessment of the participatory democratic theory advanced in the book. One of them was a program of universal citizen service. Barber believed that participation by all citizens in a national service corps program – military or nonmilitary, engaging in local, national, or international service – would achieve many of the aspirations his strong democratic theory envisioned. By emphasizing ‘‘civic duty,’’ national service would balance the citizen rights celebrated under liberal democracy with the citizen responsibilities that were necessary for building the camaraderie and community necessary for strong democracy. By bringing citizens together to work on matters of public concern, it would produce a training ground for ongoing decision-making in democracy, as well as a program of civic education through public action and participation itself, rather than the ‘‘thinner’’ brand of civic education through formal instruction that liberal democracy offered. By linking local service corps in thematic ways, national service could overcome the parochialism of local democratic programs and create in citizens ‘‘a sense of mutuality and national interdependence’’ (Barber, 1984, p. 302). Finally, by requiring all to serve in some way, a universal program would ‘‘distribute the burden of responsibility for service equally over all citizens and thereby help to overcome divisions of class, wealth, and race’’ (Barber, 1984, p. 301). Barber further articulated this idea of national service as part of a program aimed at creating a more participatory democratic citizenry – this time in the form of civic service as a college graduation requirement – eight years later, in the last chapter of An Aristocracy of Everyone. In this work he expanded on the theme of service as an ‘‘an indispensable prerequisite of citizenship and thus a condition for democracy’s preservation’’ (Barber, 1992, p. 260). Looking at the long history of democracy, Barber feared that while democratic citizenship status and the right to vote had been expanded over time to include all people, it had become less meaningful; democratic politics had become ‘‘something we watch rather than something we do’’ (Barber, 1992, p. 35). He saw community service connected to a program of

Ó 2018 Macmillan Publishers Ltd., part of Springer Nature. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 17, 4, 478–510 495 Critical Exchange civic learning as a way of simultaneously engendering collective action and educating everyone in the democratic arts of self-governance. At the same time, he hoped, such a program could increase appreciation of social interdependence and public life. Barber sought to reclaim ‘‘service’’ from its primarily military connotations, and at the same time embed community engagement in an understanding of the relationship between citizen rights and responsibilities. In this effort, Barber understood the importance of incorporating community- based service experiences into academic and liberal learning (‘‘liberal education’’ seen as a ‘‘democratic education for liberty’’). When college students leave the campus to engage with citizens in their communities in ways that are mutually respectful and beneficial, they can return to the classroom to critically reflect upon the nature of democratic civil society and the role of citizens within it, ‘‘to uncover the interdependence of self and other, to expose the intimate linkage between rights and responsibilities’’ (p. 252). Understanding service as civic education also allowed Barber to advocate for required service-learning, albeit implemented in a way that could be flexible and experimental. In fact, he believed that schools and universities could become ‘‘laboratories of citizenship and service.’’ In this way, service-based civic education could both promote democracy and restore to American colleges and universities a sense of civic mission that they once had going all the way back to the 18th century, but ‘‘have long lacked’’ (Barber, 1992, p. 261). The culmination of Barber’s civic engagement work came with President Clinton’s visit to Rutgers University in 1993 to deliver his first national service speech and introduce the new administration’s community service program (today known chiefly as AmeriCorps), on the exact anniversary of President Kennedy’s launching of the Peace Corps in 1961. Several years earlier, Barber had been tapped by Rutgers President Edward Bloustein to lead an effort to develop a unique service-learning program that would become a graduation requirement for all students at Rutgers, a large, public university. He was both the intellectual godparent and the faculty face of what became known as the Civic Education and Community Service (CECS) Program. CECS operated through credit-bearing courses across the curriculum, in different disciplines and interdisciplinary programs. All approved CECS courses needed to be grounded in civic ideals and democratic values, but each department could develop themes and content related to its particular field of study. It was Barber’s intellectual and practical work as one of the chief architects of the CECS Program that caused President Clinton to give the speech that launched his signature national service program at Rutgers. In his speech of March 1, 1993, Clinton outlined a national program that was rooted in the concept of community: the simple idea that none of us on our own will ever have as much to cherish about our own lives if we are out here all alone as we will if we work together….National service recognizes a

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simple but powerful truth that we make progress not by governmental action alone, but we do best when the people and their government work at the grassroots in genuine partnership (Clinton, 1993). Although part of Clinton’s support for national service derived from his position that ‘‘the era of big government is over,’’ and his perceived need to ‘‘reinvent government’’ as a leaner, more efficient provider of public services, another part involved using community service to strengthen people’s power and voice in civil society, as part of a revival of democratic public spaces and decision-making. During the 1990s, Barber continued to be an important voice for this conception of community service as an education for democratic citizenship. As he would chronicle in The Truth of Power, a book about his role as an informal advisor to President Clinton, his voice was pivotal in helping frame the administration’s more civic approach to service, distinctly different from the ‘‘thousand points of light’’ approach to privatized volunteerism promoted by the Bush Administrations that preceded and succeeded Clinton’s (Barber, 2001, pp. 160–181). As Barber argued, the Bush approach would have philanthropy ‘‘take over the social welfare functions of government’’ and have ‘‘discretionary charity replace the civic obligations democracies normally assume to meet the needs of their citizens.’’ He advised Clinton to see that, ‘‘far from being a surrogate for government,’’ service was a way to help young people see ‘‘that democracy meant that citizens themselves had social obligations that were as important as the obligations of governmental bureaucracies…It was a way to devolve democracy, not destroy it’’ (Barber, 2001, p. 169). To the extent community service enabled citizens to work with one another and hear each others’ stories and concerns, it could build powerful agendas for action on public policy issues to be carried out by government at all levels. During this period he also influenced the entire field of community engagement through presentations at regional and national service conferences and lectures on campuses attempting to implement service-learning programs like the one he had spearheaded at Rutgers. At the time I myself was serving as Director of the Rutgers CECS Program from 1992–1994, and I worked with Barber in that capacity. One of my primary responsibilities was to meet with faculty from different academic divisions and departments to encourage them to develop their own CECS courses. These courses would need to meet the general learning outcomes related to democratic civic education articulated by the program as a whole, but, I argued, should also explore the question of citizenship from the perspective of the unique disciplinary or pre-professional orientation of each academic unit. It was exhilarating to see courses developed in English that referenced that discipline’s conception of the ‘‘public intellectual,’’ ones in dance and painting that spoke about the role of creative arts and artists in public life, and courses that examined the civic and social responsibilities of engineers or pharmacists. Although the CECS Program never expanded to reach all academic units and students at Rutgers,

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Barber’s broad democratic civic vision, bolstered by a U.S. president’s public narrative, made it possible to have these conversations and work with faculty colleagues to develop an idea of ‘‘civic engagement across the curriculum,’’ one that might mirror similar contemporary movements in higher education that conceived of ‘‘writing across the curriculum’’ (for more on this idea, see Battistoni, 2002). Barber’s writing and advocacy, linking community engagement to democratic theory and to citizenship education, proved influential for the community service field. The 1990s witnessed a major shift in the primary language the field used to articulate its principles and purposes, from ‘‘service-learning’’ to ‘‘civic engage- ment.’’ This shift, and the concomitant emphasis on using service to encourage involvement in politics and public life, owed much to Barber’s intellectual contributions during this critical developmental period. At the time, many of us thought this shift in language would matter for the quality of our programs and for citizen engagement in our democracy. We were convinced that all higher education initiatives would use service experiences to teach students about the underlying public issues that existed in the diverse communities of which their institutions were a part. Students would internalize their responsibilities as agents of democratic change, and this in turn would increase participation in public life, particularly among young citizens. Unfortu- nately, the language of civic engagement, generated by Barber’s theoretical arguments, did not produce significant change, either in higher education or in citizen participation. This may be why Barber shifted his efforts from promoting civic engagement in higher education to addressing issues of globalization and climate change, particularly the ways cities could effectively and democratically tackle these concerns. In the field of service-learning and community engagement, another shift in language and emphasis has occurred, one that is more critical of higher education institutions’ involvement in their communities. Critical voices began seriously to question ‘‘to what end’’ service programs were aimed, and whether adequate concern was being shown toward true reciprocity with the partnerships being formed between universities and community-based organiza- tions. Barber was certainly sympathetic to these concerns, ones that continue to drive the field: he always raised the question of ‘‘To what end?’’ for any education- based service-learning program. And he always answered that, whatever else it might be, community engagement or service must primarily be about education for ‘‘citizenship, social responsibility, and politics in the broadest sense’’ (Barber, 1997, p. 227). Barber did not only contribute to the theory of civic education and community engagement: he was also a reflective practitioner. In addition to teaching courses with service-learning and community-based components, he co-edited a compre- hensive anthology that would be used as a textbook in civic education-oriented classes in a number of disciplines and on many campuses (Barber and Battistoni,

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2011). At one point, he even worked with research colleagues to develop a sophisticated measurement tool that could be used to assess whether programs and courses, not just in universities, were teaching the skills, knowledge, attitudes, and values necessary to fostering a participatory democratic culture and citizenry (Walt Whitman Center, 1997). But consistent across all of his thinking, writing, and practice was his position that community-based service experiences were never meant to be a surrogate for government or public policy advocacy, nor an ‘‘antidote’’ to a politics that has increasingly become polarized and alienating, especially for traditional college-age youth. For Barber, it was a way to engage young people in citizenship, an experiential learning ground for democracy: not a substitute or alternative to politics, but a vehicle to understanding it. He fervently believed that education for citizenship in a democracy came through the experience of participation in communities. Neither of Benjamin Barber’s major visions – for universal citizen service as part of an education for participatory democratic citizenship nor his plan for a civic education in the academy via the community engagement requirement at Rutgers University – came to pass. These projects eventually grew less important in his own theory and practice. But his vision that schools and universities connected to the communities around them through experiential engagement could produce strong civic learning was a powerful one. It still drives and inspires many of us in the field today. Richard Battistoni

Remembering Benjamin Barber on Philosophy, Politics, and Political Theory

I first read Benjamin Barber’s Strong Democracy in the summer of 1991 while working on my graduate school applications, and I soon decided that I wanted to study with the scholar and public intellectual who defended participatory democracy with such lively and learned prose. I wanted to learn from the guy who wrote, ‘‘Representative democracy is as paradoxical an oxymoron as our political language has produced’’ (Barber, 1984, p. xxii). As a graduate student at Rutgers University, I took a couple of seminars with Barber, worked as his teaching and research assistant, and wrote my dissertation under his supervision. Of course, with a student’s desire to fight the Doktorvater, I eventually produced a dissertation centered on the idea that representative democracy is not an oxymoron. I argued that practices of representation do not undermine genuine democracy but are essential to it. Nonetheless, Barber generously supported my work in countless ways, and I remain very much in his debt. Here I want to comment briefly, not on representative democracy, but on a different aspect of Barber’s work that continues

Ó 2018 Macmillan Publishers Ltd., part of Springer Nature. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 17, 4, 478–510 499 Critical Exchange to inspire me: his pragmatist view of philosophy, politics, and political theory. Barber was wary of the philosophical pursuit of truth, and he thought political theory should interact closely with everyday politics. The relation between them, while changing with time and place, should serve the larger purposes of democracy. A key theme of Barber’s work was his critique of liberal political philosophy, most fully developed in his discussion of Rawls, Nozick, and other philosophers in The Conquest of Politics (1988). In the introduction to that book, Barber warned his readers about the framing effects of philosophical discourse: ‘‘Thinking about politics creates a unique dilemma, for it seems inevitably to lead to thinking about thinking; and the more we think about thinking, the less we think about politics’’ (Barber, 1988, p. 3). Discussions on ‘‘the turf of epistemology,’’ Barber wrote elsewhere, tend to lead toward the view that democracy cannot do without some kind of prior agreement on truth, right, or other epistemological warrant – a position hotly debated in the 1980s as the question of ‘‘foundationalism’’ (Barber, 1998b, p. 19). For Barber, the goal of foundationalism in all its varieties – empiricism, positivism, and behavioral social science, on one hand, and rational- ism, idealism, and analytic philosophy, on the other – ‘‘is to ground politics in something less contingent and less corrigible than politics itself tends to be’’ (Barber, 1988, p. 6). Paraphrasing Marx, Barber remarked, ‘‘In changing his categories, the philosopher thinks he alters the political world’’ (p. 11). In practice, such efforts tend to be unsuccessful, because they are ‘‘stymied by the irreducibility of politics,’’ and philosophers have never been able to tame politics for long. But many philosophers remain ‘‘inclined to cognitive imperialism’’ and ‘‘resistant to the sovereignty of the political sphere,’’ and they stubbornly continue their efforts to master political life (p. 10). Their persistent failure, Barber argued, results from their neglect of the distinctive features of politics. Barber defined politics formally as the activities undertaken ‘‘when some action of public consequence becomes necessary and when men must thus make a public choice that is reasonable in the face of conflict despite the absence of an independent ground of judgment’’ (Barber, 1984, p. 122, original italics). Without delving into every aspect of this rich and unabashedly normative definition, I want to highlight a few key features of Barber’s view of politics as a particular form of human activity. First, Barber saw politics as a matter of action rather than knowledge. Whatever philosophers might say, ‘‘politics remains something human beings do, not something they possess or use or watch or talk or think about’’ (Barber, 1988, p. 11, original emphasis). And action always occurs within a historical context of necessities and constraints, ‘‘enmeshed in a chain of cause and effect already at work in the world’’ (p. 11; see also Barber, 1984, pp. 123–124). Referencing realist political thinkers like Machiavelli and Brecht, Barber insisted that to think politically means to take account of such mundane matters as material conditions, time limits, mixed motives, unpredictable outcomes, and the impact of

500 Ó 2018 Macmillan Publishers Ltd., part of Springer Nature. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 17, 4, 478–510 Critical Exchange nondecisions (Barber, 1984, p. 124–125). He said that ‘‘politics is a rag and bone shop of the practical and the concrete, the everyday and the ambiguous, the malleable and the evanescent’’ (p. 130). Barber’s examples of political action were thus familiar activities like building a hospital or taxing a business – instances of ‘‘doing (or not doing), making (or not making) something in the physical world that limits human behavior, changes the environment, or affects the world in some material way’’ (p. 122). A key point here is that political action, properly understood, is at least minimally conscious and deliberate, rather than mere behavior. Political action is also reasonable, in the everyday sense of fair, deliberate, not arbitrary – and yet not scientifically or philosophically true. And political action is a response to conflict of some kind. ‘‘The garden where there is no discord makes politics unnecessary; just as the jungle where there is no reasonableness makes politics impossible’’ (p. 128). From Barber’s perspective, the widespread tendency to avoid conflict amounts to a rejection of politics. Second, Barber argued, echoing Dewey, that politics involves actions ‘‘both undertaken by a public and intended to have public consequences’’ (Barber, 1984, p. 123). He noted that such actions include not only obviously public matters but also decisions by consumers, businesses, and other ostensibly private actors, whenever those decisions have public implications. Barber did not discuss feminist critiques of the liberal public–private dichotomy in this context. Nor did he devote much attention to the politics of gender relations, household labor, or other instances of the personal becoming political (cf. pp. 117, 208, 226–227, 229). He also repeatedly used spatial imagery to invoke a metaphorical ‘‘realm,’’ ‘‘arena,’’ or ‘‘domain’’ of politics (pp. 120–131). Such imagery is useful for resisting the facile notion that politics is everywhere and lacks any boundaries whatsoever, but it may also suggest a fixed conception of where politics occurs. At the same time, however, Barber also noted that the line between public and private often becomes controversial, and ‘‘it is one primary function of political activity to provide a continuing forum for the discussion and definition of these terms’’ (pp. 123–124). Indeed, although Barber argued strenuously for his own particular conception of politics, he also acknowledged that ‘‘‘What is political?’ is always a fundamental question of politics’’ (p. 124). In this respect, it seems that Barber understood politics as, first, potentially arising anywhere, and second, as a particular sphere of human activity with specific characteristics, which can and should be distinguished from philosophy, science, business, and other activities. Finally, Barber insisted that politics is and should be both autonomous from and sovereign over other human activities. The ‘‘sovereignty of the political’’ refers to ‘‘the dominion of politically adjudicated knowledge, under conditions of episte- mological uncertainty, over other forms of knowledge.’’ The sovereignty of politics is also ‘‘wholly residual’’ and ‘‘comes into play only with the breakdown of ordinary cognitive consensus’’ in contexts where a judgment is needed for common action (Barber, 1988, p. 14). For Barber, experts should inform but never replace

Ó 2018 Macmillan Publishers Ltd., part of Springer Nature. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 17, 4, 478–510 501 Critical Exchange political judgment. For example, citizens should not try to resolve disputes among biologists about the safety of genetic engineering, but rather, in cases of expert uncertainty, citizens should make judgments about how much risk they are willing to accept (pp. 201–202). When philosophers, scientists, and other experts reach consensus, or when their lack of consensus has no public implications, ‘‘the political domain claims no sovereignty’’ (p. 14). But the sovereignty of politics takes over ‘‘whenever the philosophers fail to agree among themselves (most of the time?), or fail to offer arguments persuasive to the affected public, on issues that have import for public action’’ (p. 15). Barber thus argued that citizens trump experts under two specific conditions: first, when experts disagree about a technical matter that has significant public implications, and second, when experts agree among themselves but fail to persuade citizens to accept their agreement. Moreover, Barber wrote, ‘‘It is not just that they ought to be trumped under such circumstances: it is that they are trumped and always will be, because that is the meaning of political sovereignty’’ (p. 16, original italics). Both normatively and empirically, for Barber, a lack of public agreement on expert knowledge opens the door to politics. In today’s context, in which expertise on issues like climate change, vaccines, and genetically modified foods has become highly politicized, one might have some doubts about Barber’s enthusiasm for allowing politics to trump science – doubts rendered eponymous by the policies and rhetoric of President Donald Trump. Despite expert agreement on the basic science of climate change and similar issues, scientists have not been able to ‘‘offer arguments persuasive to the affected public,’’ or at least not to large segments of it. But the scientists’ failure is not simply due to a lack of persuasive skill. It is also a result of corporate-funded misinformation campaigns, and more importantly, of the symbolic linkage, in many people’s minds, between competing expert claims and polarized partisan disputes (Jamieson et al., 2017). In this context, most citizens do not have the resources to critically evaluate expert claims, leading them to assume more expert uncertainty on many issues than actually exists. Politics thus becomes sovereign over questions that should probably be defined as primarily technical and left to experts. Nonetheless, despite these concerns, Barber’s case for the ‘‘residual sovereignty’’ of politics remains a valuable resource for resisting the recurring anti-democratic ambitions of philosophers, scientists, and other experts. Another resource for resisting such ambitions appears in Barber’s view of political theory as engaged in ongoing dialogue with politics. Most political theorists hope their work will be politically relevant in some way, but Barber argued that political relevance should be built into political theorizing from the beginning, not merely tacked on at the end. Political theorists become most politically relevant, for Barber, not when they apply their theories to politics, but when they derive their concepts and methods from politics. He thus said that his

502 Ó 2018 Macmillan Publishers Ltd., part of Springer Nature. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 17, 4, 478–510 Critical Exchange account of strong democracy ‘‘gives theoretical expression to what a great many Americans are actually doing’’ (Barber, 1984, p. xiii). More generally, he wrote: The historical aim of political theory has been dialectical or dialogical: the creation of a genuine praxis in which theory and practice are sublated and reconciled, and the criteria yielded by common action are permitted to inform and circumscribe philosophy no less than philosophical criteria are permitted to constrain the understanding of politics and inform political action. (Barber, 1988,p.4) If political theory is not partly shaped by politics, Barber thought, it will not be relevant for politics. Barber thus wrote fondly of theorists such as Karl Popper, Bertrand Russell, and Hannah Arendt who mobilized political theory in defense of democracy. He forgave their misreading of canonical linkers like Marx and Rousseau, because ‘‘they allowed political theory to join the political debate facing liberal societies over the origins and nature of totalitarianism’’ (Barber, 2006, p. 542). To be sure, Barber was also careful to preserve a distinction between politics and political theory. He avoided the conceit, embraced by some academics perhaps worried about their political relevance, that political theory is actually a form of politics. Such a view amounts to ‘‘obfuscating common-sense distinctions between thinking and doing’’ (Barber, 1988, p. 4). And Barber made clear that joining the political debate does not make political theorists into politicians: [T]he real strength of democracy is that it rarely takes the voices of scholars too seriously, and the real strength of scholars is that the prudent among them recognize that nobody has elected them to anything and that their work demands a certain autonomy from practical politics on which both their credibility and perhaps even their safety depend…Students of politics, ‘‘scientists,’’ ‘‘theorists.’’ and ‘‘philosophers’’ alike, must learn how to stand close enough to comprehend what is happening – pure objectivity is neither desirable nor even an option; but not so close as to be consumed by the flames (Barber, 2006, p. 544; see also Barber, 2001, p. 309). For Barber, political theorists should begin and end their inquiries with the problems and categories of politics, while remembering that their craft involves a set of norms and practices no less distinctive than politics itself. Over the course of his career, Barber himself seemed to move ever closer to the flames of politics. He had never confined himself to academia, but during the 1990s Barber took his public engagement to a new level when he joined other intellectuals at the White House for a series of advisory meetings with President Bill Clinton. His ‘‘memorable affair with President Clinton,’’ as he called it, ultimately had little impact on the President’s policies (Barber, 2001, p. 13). But Barber said he regretted only the intellectuals’ failure to establish a coherent public narrative for the Clinton presidency, not their lack of policy influence. In a democracy,

Ó 2018 Macmillan Publishers Ltd., part of Springer Nature. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 17, 4, 478–510 503 Critical Exchange presidents are accountable to voters, not intellectuals (p. 309). And whatever the frustrations of advising a disappointing president, they apparently did not dissuade Barber from further political engagement. He gave countless lectures to public audiences, he consulted with governments and civic organizations around the world, and he worked tirelessly to create and maintain transnational initiatives like Interdependence Day and the Global Parliament of Mayors. Not surprisingly, in recent years, the former editor of the journal Political Theory participated only rarely in the discussions and debates of academic political theory. Barber argued eloquently that political theorists should resist the seductions of philosophy, but as someone who missed seeing him at academic conferences, I sometimes wondered if he had sufficiently resisted the seductions of politics. Unfortunately, I never asked him about it. I suspect he might have replied, quite rightly, that regardless of how scholars negotiate the tensions between politics and political theory, a more important question is whether they keep working, in whatever way they can, to sustain and expand possibilities for democracy. Democracy provides the best context for both politics and political theory, and for Barber, it was what made them worthwhile. Mark B. Brown

Reading Benjamin Barber’s Democratic ‘‘Fictions’’

My bookshelf holds a copy of Benjamin Barber’s novel Marriage Voices (1981) that bears the following inscription, ‘‘this is a kind of truth more strange than fiction – as so much of my political truth seems fictitious.’’ I recall that Ben was only half serious when he wrote these words. They strike me today as an astute self-reflection on his approach to political theory. That approach was unique for his refusal to indulge either abstract philosophizing or utopian imagining, instead committing to link practical politics to political vision. The various contributions to this exchange demonstrate that Barber’s books and projects became more and more tightly linked to the everyday of political decision- making and action over the course of his career. Barber’s writings on cities and his successful practical experiments with ‘‘Interdependence Day’’ and the ‘‘Global Parliament of Mayors’’ (see Barber, 2013), took inspiration from the best of existing democratic practice, which he let shape his vision rather than the other way around. In his early work, he takes a more prescriptive role, positioning himself as an architect of virtuous institutions – like the legislator in Rousseau, the political theorist whom Barber loved for his paradoxes (not in spite of them). Barber may have been at his most ‘‘fictitious’’ in Strong Democracy (1984). A call to civic action (published fully twenty-five years before the US electorate would welcome as its president a community organizer with barely four years in a

504 Ó 2018 Macmillan Publishers Ltd., part of Springer Nature. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 17, 4, 478–510 Critical Exchange national political office), that book was profoundly at odds with its time. Ronald Reagan was on the verge of re-election, peddling nostalgic platitudes in a cultural context of voracious materialism that made Oliver Stone’s ‘‘Wall Street’’ (1987) and Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) look like documentaries. Against this backdrop, Barber set forth an optimistic political vision of a mass democratic politics motored by ‘‘free, active, self-governing citizens’’ engaged in ‘‘human self- realization through mutual transformation’’ (Barber, 1984, pp. 217, 215). Just grant him the idea that people seek out opportunities for civic activity. Now imagine that through political participation we change our world and each other for the better. This is Barber at his most visionary, inspiring presidents, mayors worldwide, educators, students, and the many donors who supported the public projects he pursued so energetically over the last two decades of his career. Strong Democracy came out as I entered my second year in the graduate program at Rutgers. I had always figured that it was a political theory sequel to Barber’s first big academic book, The Death of Communal Liberty: A History of Freedom in a Swiss Mountain Canton (1974), which I never took the time to read. I imagined a quaintly anachronistic narrative of rustic citizens talking politics when they were not herding goats. Thankfully, Barber was not the type to assign his own works in graduate seminars; this one, he should have. Death of Communal Liberty deserves a place with some of the most interesting works of political theory being published today. It even figures more centrally in political theory as it is practiced today than it could possibly have done at the time of its publication, when the subfield was still focused primarily on close textual readings of canonical works. Barber’s first book does not read like a revised dissertation. It is methodolog- ically innovative, at once translating painstaking archival research into an epic narrative and making a sharp engagement with political theoretic debates about sovereignty and modernity. This is comparative political theory long before we had a name for it, as Barber takes up the Swiss case as a ‘‘perspective from which the parochialism of Anglo-American political traditions is thrown into sharp relief’’ (1974, p. 8). It is also explicitly counter-hegemonic. Barber looks to the independent Republic of Graubu¨nden not to ‘‘establish decisively the philosophical validity’’ of its version of democracy but to ‘‘disestablis[h] the claims to exclusivity of constitutional liberals’’ (1974, p. 8). Barber writes: Nothing we learn from the remarkable history of liberty in Graubu¨nden can be used to deny definitively the lessons of American or English history, nothing revealed by its unique political life taken as a certain remedy for the deficiencies of our own. Yet almost every discovery we make in confronting it acts as a foil to familiar ideas and as a challenge to liberal shibboleths (1974, p. 17). Graubu¨nden provides the template for some of the strong democratic institutions that Barber would envision a decade later. Take the ‘‘extraordinary

Ó 2018 Macmillan Publishers Ltd., part of Springer Nature. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 17, 4, 478–510 505 Critical Exchange practice…known as common work (Gemeinarbeit),’’ where citizens set tax rates, decide on projects for improving common properties, and then go on to build them – entirely without compensation (Barber, 1974, p. 176). What could explain this extraordinary practice? Simply: Rousseau. ‘‘It was as if the neighborhood citizen had taken Rousseau’s injunction that the will, being inalienable, cannot be represented,’’ and extended it from the activity of willing to those of ‘‘doing and acting’’ (1974, p. 177). This mountain canton would have none of Tocqueville’s ‘‘soft despotism’’: ‘‘In the most fundamental sense, the citizen was the communal authority: its will was his will, its needs were his needs, its instrumentalities were his very limbs, and its power was his sweat and his blood’’ (Barber, 1974, p. 178). This resistance to delegate to a centralized administrative or executive agency was not an unqualified virtue. The citizens’ stubborn attachment to autonomy meant that they had to treat public problems in their ‘‘least salient minutiae’’ as well as in their ‘‘principled essence’’; they ‘‘were frequently plunged into a morass of trivia in which the sublime became indistinguishable from the ridiculous’’ (Barber, 1974, p. 185). Barber relates one instance where ‘‘an inquiry concerning the wisdom of repairing certain barrels and vats in Maienfeld circulated together with the proposed text of a vital state treaty with Hapsburg Austria’’ (1974, p. 185). We are meant to see a paradox: the communes were so jealous of their sovereignty as to squander it on trivia. Barber stands up for the Swiss on this point, deeming their openness to ‘‘occasional idiosyncrasies’’ as a small price to pay for a ‘‘vital participatory democracy in which the citizenry were encouraged to put as well as to answer legislative questions,’’ and then resurrecting that vitality in strong democracy’s multi-choice initiative and referendum and feedback polls (Barber, 1974, p. 189; Barber, 1984, pp. 283–291). I expected to find these ties between communal liberty’s past and strong democracy’s present. Barber’s book took me by surprise with the finding that he did not carry over into his later work. With respect to what today would be termed the ‘‘competence’’ of the Alpine citizen, Barber makes a surprising admission that, for all his ‘‘sophisticated worldliness’’ with respect to the technical details of statutes, treaties, and public projects, ‘‘the communal citizen displayed a persistent and astonishing ignorance of almost everything not immediately tangible to his practical political life’’ (1974, p. 200). On questions of science and technoscience – Does the earth revolve around the sun? Can gypsum be used as a fertilizer? Is an earthquake, meteor, or owl a portent of doom? – he allowed himself to be ruled by superstition, magic, and religion (Barber, 1974, p. 200). This incongruity inspires Barber to pose a question of heart-stopping pertinence today: How is the citizen to rule himself if, steeped in political prudence and practical wisdom, he nonetheless remains ignorant of the natural world in which politics and policies manifest themselves? To work collectively for progress means little if progress is measured either by the burning of witches

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or by the stubbornness with which foreign science is spurned (1974, pp. 200–201). This question figures into Strong Democracy nowhere that I remember. That book edits out this dark side of Alpine democracy to carry forward only its best features. I do not mean to suggest that Barber willfully repressed the one feature of his archive that belies his life’s commitments. I mean, rather, to take up the gesture of his inscription – to allow theory its fictitious aspects and grant fiction its truths. Lisa Disch Notes

1 Some of what appears in this paragraph and the next two is taken from Mansbridge (1987), review of Strong Democracy; other paragraphs in this essay draw from Mansbridge and Latura (2017). 2 In a detail that Ben undoubtedly refused consciously to crop from the photograph, the citizen’s hands, clasped behind his back, hold a rosary. The photograph is taken from Bichhler (1969), opposite p. 265, with permission of the publisher. The photograph of ‘‘Representative Government’’ is taken from Tobler (1971, p. 27), with permission of the publisher. 3 For a parsing of this sentence that criticizes its focus on commonality, see Bickford (1996).

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