Jihad vs Mc World
Benjamin Barber, the director of the Walt Whitman Center for the Culture and Politics of Democracy at Rutgers University, is today's leading advocate of "participatory" democracy. Not content with mere representation, he aims to make every citizen a legislator, to bring about, as he puts it, "unmediated self-government." To this ambitious end, he speaks with remarkable single-mindedness on the academic conference circuit, celebrating the civic potential of the people and sounding, very often, less like a professor than a politician on the stump.
Barber's writings over the years have been dedicated both to promoting this ideal regime and, still more, to combating the currents of thought that are opposed to it. In his best-known work, Strong Democracy (1984), he criticized those modern philosophers-Hobbes, Locke, and Mill, among others-who define political liberty negatively (being left alone) rather than in positive terms (civic action). In The Conquest of Politics (1988), he denounced such contemporary political theorists as John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and Alasdair MacIntyre for their "abstractionism," saying that they ignored the practical concerns of the engaged citizen. And in An Aristocracy of Everyone (1992), he found enemies of democratic education at both ends of the political spectrum, in the fashionable relativism of the left and in the tradition-minded elitism of the right.
In his latest book, Jihad vs. McWorld, based on a 1992 article in the Atlantic Monthly, Barber turns from the intellectual threats to his vision of democracy to the socioeconomic ones. His title refers to what he sees as the two premier global trends of our day, movements that are, respectively, reducing the world to intractable fragments and giving it an unprecedented unity.
The book's first part concerns McWorld, the ever-expanding service sector of the international economy, especially as it manifests itself in what Barber calls the "infotainment telesector," American in
Barber's writings over the years have been dedicated both to promoting this ideal regime and, still more, to combating the currents of thought that are opposed to it. In his best-known work, Strong Democracy (1984), he criticized those modern philosophers-Hobbes, Locke, and Mill, among others-who define political liberty negatively (being left alone) rather than in positive terms (civic action). In The Conquest of Politics (1988), he denounced such contemporary political theorists as John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and Alasdair MacIntyre for their "abstractionism," saying that they ignored the practical concerns of the engaged citizen. And in An Aristocracy of Everyone (1992), he found enemies of democratic education at both ends of the political spectrum, in the fashionable relativism of the left and in the tradition-minded elitism of the right.
In his latest book, Jihad vs. McWorld, based on a 1992 article in the Atlantic Monthly, Barber turns from the intellectual threats to his vision of democracy to the socioeconomic ones. His title refers to what he sees as the two premier global trends of our day, movements that are, respectively, reducing the world to intractable fragments and giving it an unprecedented unity.
The book's first part concerns McWorld, the ever-expanding service sector of the international economy, especially as it manifests itself in what Barber calls the "infotainment telesector," American in