JIHAD VS. MCWORLD is an essential text for anyone who wants to understand the challenges facing us after the tragic events of September 11, 2001 and in light of the current conflict in the Middle East. In a groundbreaking work, political scientist Benjamin R. Barber offers a penetrating analysis of the central conflict of our times: consumerist capitalism versus religious and tribal fundamentalism. These diametrically opposed but intertwined forces are tearing apart - and bringing together - the world as we know it, undermining democracy and the nation-state on which it depends. On the one hand, capitalism on the global level is rapidly dissolving the social and economic barriers between nations, transforming the world's diverse populations into a blandly uniform market. On the other hand, ethnic, religious, and racial hatreds are fragmenting the political landscape into smaller and smaller tribal units. JIHAD VS. MCWORLD is the term that Barber has coined to describe the powerful and paradoxical interdependence of these forces. In this important book, now more timely than ever before, he explores the alarming repercussions of this potent dialectic and in his new introduction sketches a democratic response to terrorism.