James David Barber (July 31, 1930 – September 12, 2004) was a political scientist whose book The Presidential Character made him famous for his classification of presidents through their worldviews.
Barber was born on July 31, 1930, in Charleston, West Virginia, to a physician and a nurse.
[1] In the 1950s he served in the United States Army as a counter-intelligence agent before attending the University of Chicago, where he earned a master's degree in political science.
He joined the faculty at Duke University in 1972, and became a full professor there in 1977.
He devised a system of organizing a president's character into either active-positive, passive-positive, active-negative, or passive-negative.