Benjamin R. Barber

The untimely death of Adam Yauch, "MCA" of the Beastie Boys, reminds us again of how naturally it comes to artists and musicians to think and act interdependently, even as our political and media leaders think and act with stunning parochialism.

Not long after 9/11, with President Bush...

Media hypocrisy about the Occupy Wall Street movement is old news. But the New York Times hit the "refresh" button once again with its coverage of the May Day demonstrations in New York and around the country on May 2. And it is supposedly the last serious newspaper with a...

Believing in the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary, I have generally resisted the partisan claims from Left and Right that you, our life-term justices on the Supreme Court, dispense justice with a heavy ideological hand, in accord with partisan political biases.
I recognize that...

300 years ago, a watchmaker in Geneva, Switzerland, fathered a son who became the first powerful voice against inequality in an urbanizing Europe in which the costs of capitalism and private property were already clear. Jean-Jacques Rousseau proclaimed in his Social Contract that men, though born free, were everywhere in...

Last week, Steven Pearlstein offered a Swiftian proposal in The Washington Post to legalize buying votes and thus make the bribing of voters -- already the norm in practice -- a legal norm as well. Clear away all the hypocritical rhetoric about democracy and get on with selling...

The front-runners in the Iowa caucuses and now in the New Hampshire primary, seem to detest one another, but they agree on one thing: that the Democrats want unlimited government pushing unearned "entitlements" and Obama style "socialism," while Republicans seek an "opportunity society" which means, well, no government at all....

Given how extraordinarily successful it has been both in its own terms and in its capacity to grab the attention of the media, Occupy Wall Street has been conveniently misunderstood by its supporters and detractors alike. Recently, Mayor Bloomberg patronized it haughtily, saying "It's fun and it's cathartic...

His death was violent and ugly, but what the people he ruled over for 42 years with a violent hand wished for. And what he wanted. Muammar Gaddafi died in his home town holding a silver pistol, killed by some combination of a NATO strike that intercepted his caravan and...

Observing our small bore politicians bickering while America risks fiscal and moral collapse from the vantage point of a ceremony in Gdansk, Poland -- in which two political heroes are being honored -- is a bracing if dispiriting experience. Bracing because to watch Founder of Solidarity (Solidarność) and former Polish...

Today is Interdependence Day: the day after September 11, when, ten years ago, brutal terrorists attacked the United States of America as they have attacked so many other people around the world before and since.

This year, fittingly, we are celebrating Interdependence Day in New York City at...

There is no better proof for the gullibility (or worse) of Western media than how easily they have been manipulated by rebel spokesmen for the Libyan insurgency. From Sunday through Monday evening for more than 24 hours, broadcast and cable media outlets reported the rebels had captured Saif Gaddafi and...

American exceptionalism glides complacently into the 21st century on a lie and a prayer. The lie comprises all the flag-waving hyperbole, the exceptionalist claim that "We're Number One," when as measured by far too many key indicators we are actually closer to being #10 (social mobility) or maybe #34 (infant...

Today's inspiring but faltering Middle Eastern and North African uprisings have awakened the appetite for democracy across the region without however assuring its satisfaction. They have ushered in an Arab Spring that, however, rather than leading to a summer flowering of democracy look like they might instead lead straight to...

The original United Nations mandate that led to the no-fly zone in Libya to protect civilians and prevent a massacre in Benghazi has long since been met, without however bringing an end to armed hostilities and the continuing death of civilians. NATO seems to have morphed from an instrument of...

[Music, Bernard Rands; Libretto, J. D. McClatchy; Conductor, Arthur Fagen; Stage Director, Vincent Liotta; Costume Designer, Linda Pisano; Production Designer, Barry Steele; Choreographer, Michael Vernon. CAST: David Adam Moore, Jacob Williams, Luke Williams, Elizabeth Toy, Peter Thoresen, Kirsta Costin, Hirotaka Kata, Corey Bonar, James Arnold, Paoloma Friedhof.]

To be present...

What does President Obama want in Libya? To protect civilians in the name of humanitarianism? To help the rebels "win" the war they clearly cannot win on their own? Or to overthrow Gaddafi with or without the help of the insurgents? And what does any of this have to do...

For those Libyans who have risked their lives in the name of democracy, the fates have engineered a beneficent reversal as radical as any history has seen. The fates in question are not Greek gods, but Arab, French, British and American politicians. An uprising on the brink of extinction at...

It is absurd to think that you can predict or even know anything in the middle of a revolution in a foreign country with desultory communications. But because so much turns on what happens next in Libya for the Libyans, as well as for Africa and the Middle East, and...

I offer my views about Libya here not just as a democratic theorist and HuffPost regular, but as a member of the International Board of the Gaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation until this morning, when I resigned. The only two questions worth speculating about in the absence of hard...

The two most astonishing features of the altogether astonishing Tahrir Square uprising, as well as of the protests it has catalyzed around the region, are the role of the Internet and the prevalence of non-violence. I want to suggest these two characteristics of the new Middle Eastern street politics that...