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| If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities
ISBN: 9780300164831
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Yale University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Mayors -- Case studies; Municipal government; Leadership; Comparative government;
In an impassioned love letter to cities and their political leaders, Barber (Jihad vs. McWorld) celebrates the diversity and ferment that embody urban life. Modern cities, he claims, fulfill the promises of John Dewey and Walt Whitman's paeans to democracy by allowing "democratic voices, ardent dreamers and lawless artists" to inspire each other. It is not always clear how mayors fit into this tumult of roiling humanity, but Barber calls them "possibly the best hope we have for the survival of democracy across borders." By focusing on practical solutions to the day-to-day problems that affect their constituents, mayors champion a mode of governance characterized by collaboration and consensus, and the global ties they create offer a more human-centered, applied style of politics than the contentiousness of national legislatures or the bureaucratic talking shops of the U.N. and European Union, according to the author. Barber is more interested in crafting a metaphysics of urban life than the down-to-earth minutiae of local stewardship (he derides congestion pricing schemes, markedly successful in many cities, as "keeping-the-poor-from-driving plan[s]" without offering any realistic alternative), and in the throes of his "longing for and expectation of an interdependent urbanity as encompassing as humanity's perfervid imagination," he neglects to notice that many of his castles are planted firmly in the air. Agent: Steve Wasserman, Kneerim, Williams & Bloom. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Benjamin Reynolds Barber was born in Manhattan, New York on August 2, 1939. He received a bachelor's degree in political science from Grinnell College in 1960 and a master's degree in government in 1963 and a doctorate in 1966 from Harvard University. In 1969, he began teaching political science at Rutgers University, where he was the director of the Walt Whitman Center for the Culture and Politics of Democracy for many years. In 2001, he joined the University of Maryland as the Kekst Professor of Civil Society. He was a political theorist and author. His books included Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age, The Conquest of Politics: Liberal Philosophy in Democratic Times, Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World, The Truth of Power: Intellectual Affairs in the Clinton White House, Fear's Empire: War, Terrorism and Democracy, If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities, and Cool Cities: Urban Sovereignty and the Fix for Global Warming. In addition to his books, Barber was a frequent contributor to several magazines including The Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, and The New York Times. In 1974, he helped found the journal Political Theory, which he edited for the next decade. He coauthored the prize-winning, ten-part PBS/CBC television series The Struggle for Democracy. He died from pancreatic cancer on April 24, 2017 at the age of 77. (Bowker Author Biography) |
