Arthur F. Bentley

Arthur Fisher Bentley, born Freeport, Illinois, October 16, 1870 - died Paoli, Indiana, May 21, 1957, was an American political scientist and philosopher who worked in the fields of epistemology, logic and linguistics and who contributed to the development of a behavioral methodology of political science.

Biography

He received his B.A. in 1892 and his Ph.D. in 1895 from Johns Hopkins University. He was the second person to win the Humanist of the Year Award.

Work

Bentley held that interactions of groups are the basis of political life, and rejected statist abstractions. In his opinion, group activity determined legislation, administration and adjudication. These ideas of process-based behavioralism later became central to political science. His tenet that "social movements are brought about by group interaction" is a basic feature of contemporary pluralist and interest-group approaches.

His work "The Process of Government", published in 1908, had much influence on political science from the 1930s to the 1950s. Although initially not of consequence, it influenced other groups such as the Chicago School who also tried to develop objective, value-free analyses of the political field.

His paper "The Human Skin: Philosophy's Last Line of Defense" (1941) was published in "Philosophy of Science" 8 (1941): 1-19. and is available from the Mead Project at Brock University [http://www.brocku.ca/MeadProject/Bentley/Bentley_1941.html]

In 1949, he co-authored "Knowing and the Known", a series of papers on epistemology, with John Dewey.

Bibliography

*"The Condition of the Western Farmer as Illustrated by the Economic History of a Nebraska Township" (1893). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.
*"The Process of Government: A Study of Social Pressures" (1908). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
*"Relativity In Man And Society" (1926). New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons.
*"Linguistic Analysis of Mathematics" (1932). Bloomington, Indiana: The Principia Press.
*"Behavior, Knowledge, Fact" (1935). Bloomington, Indiana: The Principia Press.
*(with John Dewey) "Knowing and the Known" (1949). Boston: The Beacon Press.
*"Inquiry Into Inquiries: Essays in Social Theory" (1954). Boston: The Beacon Press.

References