Benjamin Barber

Benjamin R. Barber (1939-) is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos, as well as president and director of the international NGO CivWorld at Demos. Extensively published, he wrote the book Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism are Reshaping the World while Whitman Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University.

He has been an outside advisor to President Bill Clinton and has consulted with President Herzog and President Rau of the Federal Republic of Germany, Former President of Slovenia Milan Kucan, current President of Slovenia Janez Drnovsek and the Center for European Perspective's Intercultural Dialogue, the Liberal Party of Sweden, and the European Parliament. He also serves on the advisory board of the state of Baden-Wuertemburg's Citizenship Council.

He was a founding editor and for ten years editor-in-chief of the international quarterly Political Theory.

Honors

He holds a knighthood (Palmes Academiques/Chevalier) from the French Government (2001), the Berlin Prize of the American Academy of Berlin (2001) and the John Dewey Award (2003). He has also been awarded Guggenheim, Fulbright, and Social Science Research Fellowships, honorary doctorates from Grinnell College, Monmouth University and Connecticut College, and has held the chair of American Civilization at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris.

Education

• B.A. from Grinnell College in 1960, with prior study at the Albert Schweitzer College in Switzerland and the London School of Economics
• M.A., Harvard University, 1963
• Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1967. His dissertation, written under the direction of Louis Hartz, was a comparative study in which he argued in favor of the virtues of Switzerland's participatory cantons over the inadequacies of Western liberal representative democracies. From 1974 to 1983 he was editor of the journal Political Theory,