Benjamin Barber, a political theorist who worked at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1960s, died on April 24 of pancreatic cancer. He was 77 years old.

Dr. Barber was born in Manhattan and grew up in Greenwich Village. He attended Stockbridge School, a progressive boarding school in Massachusetts. He spent a year studying at the Albert Schweitzer College in Churwalden, Switzerland, and a year at the London School of Economics before earning a bachelor’s degree in 1960 from Grinnell College in Iowa. He then earned a master’s degree in government in 1963 and a doctorate in 1966, both from Harvard. He was a lecturer for three years at Albert Schweitzer College before joining Penn in 1966 as an assistant professor. He left in 1969.

Dr. Barber held a number of academic appointments at various schools and several posts at think tanks and public policy organizations throughout his career. In 1974, he helped found the journal Political Theory and was its editor for the next decade.

He had most recently been Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Fordham University Urban Consortium, founder and president of the Global Parliament of Mayors Project and the Walt Whitman Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Rutgers University.

He was author of several books, most recently Cool Cities: Urban Sovereignty and the Fix for Global Warming, published by Yale University Press in April.

He is survived by his second wife, Leah (Kreutzer); his children, Cornelia, Jeremy and Rebecca; two half-brothers, Charles and Hilary; and six grandchildren.

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