Uncontrollable Passion. - Review - book review

Reason, May, 2000 by Loren Lomasky

For three decades Benjamin Barber, a professor of political science at Rutgers University and director of the school's Walt Whitman Center for the Culture and Politics of Democracy, has carried the banners of Rousseau and of the Thomas Jefferson who apotheosizes a nation of virtuous and politically vigilant freeholders (although, as we shall see, not the Jefferson who affirms the priority of individuals' rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness). At a time when most prominent theorists of the left were hostile or, at best, ambivalent toward American (or Amerikan) traditions, Barber held up images of the nation's past as proud templates for correcting what he took to be its deeply flawed present. He was respectful but less than adulatory toward things Marxian, advocating a power to the people that was distinctly more populist than the one favored by the gerontocracy in Moscow and its American apologists.

These deviations from the norms of his native ideological ecosystem may have marginalized Barber during the early stages of his career. But with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and increasing desperation, even in university humanities departments, among leftists hoping to sketch a socialism with a human face, Barber's brand of progressive politics is attracting favorable notice from those in need of a new cudgel with which to pummel free markets and globalization. It doesn't hurt that, in an arena in which turgid, jargon-ridden prose is the rule, Barber can spin a phrase with the dexterity of Derek Jeter turning a double play at second base. And in a country in which it is an article of faith for many that the cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy, the fervor that Barber avows in the title of his collected articles, A Passion for Democracy, is an additional asset.

Make no mistake, though: The object of Barber's affections is not the routine business of periodic elections and representative institutions. Toward these the dominant passion he displays is disdain. Nor does Barber have much time for public choice theory's concerns about voters' rational ignorance. He glibly remarks, "a citizen need be no more technically knowledgeable than Ronald Reagan to be effective-for surely we need not ask more of citizens than of presidents." Of course presidents, unlike ordinary individuals, are full-time occupants of their political role and with the press of a button can avail themselves of endless oceans of expertise, but these differences aren't allowed to get in the way of a clever dig. Rehabilitation of the occasional voter isn't part of Barber's design anyhow. To the contrary, he disparages the voter as he extols the citizen. The former, maintains Barber, enjoys freedom only on the day he casts a ballot, and in voting to be represented renounces that freedom. The citizen, on the other hand, is active not passive, is continuously rather than intermittently involved in the practice of collective decision making, and values political activity intrinsically rather than merely as an instrument necessary for providing a grab bag of other goods.