Benjamin R. Barber, "Time, Work, and Leisure in a Civil Society"

Benjamin R. Barber, one of the most distinguished political theorists of our time, is the author of the international bestseller, Jihad vs McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism are Reshaping the World (1995), the classic Strong Democracy (1984), and, most recently, The Truth of Power: Intellectual Affairs in the Clinton White House (2001), in which he draws on the six years he spent as an informal adviser to the president to show the limited influence intellectuals have on the shaping of public policy. The challenge for democratic leaders in the twenty-first century, Barber believes, will be to find ways for civil society to fulfill its responsibility to mediate between public and private, between community and individual, and between the power of public communities and the liberty of private individuals, a challenge made all the more difficult in a time when citizens and governments tend to confuse the freedom to shop with electoral democracy.

In the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, Barber's argument, first made in Jihad Vs McWorld, that the two greatest threats to democracy at the end of the twentieth century were religious fundamentalism and economic and cultural globalization now seems prophetic. If democracy is to survive into the twenty-first century and thrive as a form of mass political organization, Barber has argued recently, the United States, Britain, and their allies cannot simply defeat terrorism militarily; rather, these nations will all "have to open a second civic and democratic front aimed, not against terrorism 'per se,' but against the anarchism and social chaos - the economic reductionism and its commercializing homogeneity - that have created the climate of despair and hopelessness that terrorism has so effectively exploited."

Barber is currently Kekst Professor of Civil Society at the University of Maryland and one of the principal organizers of The Democracy Collaborative, an international consortium of the world's leading academic centers and citizen engagement organizations concerned with studying and promoting civil society. "Time, Work, and Leisure in a Civil Society," the concluding chapter in Barber's A Place for Us: How to Make Society Civil and Democracy Strong (1998), reflects on the crucial role that free time plays in nurturing a citizenry committed to avoiding the excesses of fundamentalism, on the one hand, and global capitalism, on the other.

Barber, Benjamin R. "Time, Work, and Leisure in a Civil Society." A Place For Us: How to Make Society Civil and Democracy Strong. (Hill and Wang, 1998), 124-147.
Digital image comes from the The University of Maryland's School for Public Policy website.
Biographical information drawn from materials available at the Walt Whitman Center site.
Citation taken from Benjamin Barber's "Ballots versus Bullets." Financial Times, Oct. 20, 2001.

Links to Explore:

Is Democratization a Response to Terrorism? An interview with Benjamin Barber conducted by Mark Schmitt is Director for Program of Governance and Public Policy at the Open Society Institute on Nov. 1, 2001.

The Walt Whitman Center: founded in 1989 by Benjamin Barber, The Whitman Center works to encourage "Walt Whitman's ideal of a vigorous citizenry engaged in the culture and politics of a free society." Site includes a link to The State of Electronically Enhanced Democracy, a report Benjamin Barber, Kevin Mattson, and John Peterson.

Democracy and Cyberspace: First Principles :summaries of a talk delivered by Ira Magaziner at the Democracy and Digital Media conference and responses by Benjamin Barber and Joshua Cohen regarding the role that the Internet has to play in a democratic society.

The League of Women Voters: a site devoted to encouraging participation in democracy.

Questions for Learning:

• In Is Democratization a Response to Terrorism? describes terrorism as "turning the tools of modernity against modernity itself." What does this mean? And what does he mean when he says that most all of us have, at what time or another, worried about the threat of consumer capitalism--that most of us have felt its threat and have sympathized with those who try to preserve a clear space for themselves?

• Would you say that The Walt Whitman Center, which Benjamin Barber founded in 1989, works to promote the sort of "active citizenry" that he discusses in "Making Civil Society Real"? What practical role can such a center, located in a university, play in creating a civil society? What role does this center play in the lives of the undergraduates at the university?
  

• At the Democracy and Digital Media conference, Benjamin Barber had a chance to respond directly to the argument that the government has no place in trying to regulate information technology. After you've read Ira Magaziner's argument and the exchanges with Barber, Joshua Cohen, and the moderator Mitchell Resnick, what would you say about the quality of the exchange? Does the discussion exemplify the virtues of a civil society as Barber describes it? What are the benefits of having such discussions in public? And what are the limits of such discussions?
  

• The League of Women Voters is just one of many national organizations concerned with keeping citizens informed and promoting voter turnout. Can virtual meeting places such as this one serve the function of getting citizens to register and vote? As you explore the site, who would you say the site is designed for?

Questions for connecting:

• How do Barber's ideas about education and his reflections upon his own schooling experiences compare to the ideas expressed by Drucker? Consider Drucker's remark that, "One of the major reasons for the steady decline in the capacity of the schools to do their job -- that is, to teach children elementary knowledge skills -- is surely that since the 1950s the United States has increasingly made the schools the carriers of all kinds of social policies: the elimination of racial discrimination, of discrimination against all kinds of minorities, including the handicapped, and so on." How do Barber's views on multicultural curriculum compare to Drucker's view that "making the school the organ of social policies has, without any doubt, severely impaired its capacity to do its own job"?

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