Arthur Fisher Bentley was an American political scientist

Political science

Political Science is a social science discipline concerned with the study of the state, government and politics. Aristotle defined it as the study of the state. It deals extensively with the theory and practice of politics, and the analysis of political systems and political behavior...

 and philosopher who worked in the fields of epistemology, logic

Logic

In philosophy, Logic is the formal systematic study of the principles of valid inference and correct reasoning. Logic is used in most intellectual activities, but is studied primarily in the disciplines of philosophy, mathematics, semantics, and computer science...

 and linguistics

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

 and who contributed to the development of a behavioral methodology of political science.

Biography

He received his Bachelor of Arts in 1892 and his Ph.D. in 1895 from Johns Hopkins University

Johns Hopkins University

The Johns Hopkins University, commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins, is a private research university based in Baltimore, Maryland, United States...

. 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

Pluralism (political theory)

Classical pluralism is the view that politics and decision making are located mostly in the framework of government, but that many non-governmental groups use their resources to exert influence. The central question for classical pluralism is how power and influence is distributed in a political...

 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

Chicago school (sociology)

In sociology and later criminology, the Chicago School was the first major body of works emerging during the 1920s and 1930s specialising in urban sociology, and the research into the urban environment by combining theory and ethnographic fieldwork in Chicago, now applied elsewhere...

 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

In 1949, he co-authored Knowing and the Known

Knowing and the Known

Knowing and the Known is a 1949 book by John Dewey and Arthur Bentley.- Overview :As well as a Preface, an Introduction and an Index, the book consists of 12 chapters, or papers, as the authors call them in their introduction...

, a series of papers on epistemology, with John Dewey

John Dewey

John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey was an important early developer of the philosophy of pragmatism and one of the founders of functional psychology...

.