Arthur Fisher Bentley Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Arthur Fisher Bentley (1870–1957) was an American political scientist and philosopher who worked in the fields of epistemology, logic, and linguistics. Along with his colleague, philosopher and psychologist John Dewey, Bentley also contributed to the development of a behavioral methodology of political science. Bentley, however, did not gain wide recognition in the field until forty years after the publication of his most noted work, The Process of Government (1908). This book laid the foundation of the study of groups by breaking with the pre–World War I (1914–1918) traditions of political science research.

Bentley also influenced the Chicago school in the development of value-free, objective analyses. His idea that process based behavioralism is a basic feature of contemporary pluralist and interest groups later became central to political science. He held that interactions of groups are the basis of political life and rejected statist abstractions. Bentley asserted that group activity was the fundamental datum available to describe and understand the social behavior of people. He sought an end to reliance on all prior ideas, ideals, and concepts, and what he derisively called “mind stuff.” He believed that what groups were, what they did, and what they sought should not be distorted through biased observation and description or through anticipatory conceptual frameworks or limiting paradigms. Government in its various forms was one such group activity manifested publicly.

Bentley’s concern was to outline methods, not to obtain results, and his method was only a research protocol, not a philosophical system. The term Bentley an was added to the political science lexicon as a description of activity free of “mind stuff ” but with purposes and goals contained in the activity and stated in its description. The key to Bentley’s analysis was his use of the term activity as a synonym for interest. Bentley himself was against definitions, which he held to be limiting.

Bentley found the thought of German philosopher Karl Marx too rigid and abstract, although he was interested in economics and the economic life. Like Austrian scholar Ludwig Gumplowicz, whom he admired, Bentley found that the only possible solution of the social question lay in a harmonious cooperation of the social groups as far as that was possible. Bentley was a reformer despite his stubborn skepticism. He relied on American progressivism and the constitutional rules that helped to make government benign and curbed the striving for dominance by any one group. He viewed government as extending beyond formal governing institutions to include associations and corporations, and he urged the elimination of notions of sovereignty and the state from political investigation.

None of Bentley’s later works focused on politics, government, or economics, with the exception of Relativity in Man and Society (1926), in which he argued that social scientists should apply a space-time approach and relativism in their investigations. All human action needed to be placed in the social context of its period. His last book was Knowing and the Known (1949), a collaboration with John Dewey.

Bentley was honored in 1953 by the American Political Science Association. In 1954 the American Humanist Association voted him Humanist of the Year.

Bibliography:

Kress, Paul F. Social Science and the Idea of Process: The Ambiguous Legacy of Arthur F. Bentley. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.
Ratner, Sidney. “Arthur F. Bentley, 1870–1957.” Journal of Philosophy 55 (July 1958): 573–578.