Arthur Fisher Bentley

Background

Arthur Bentley was born on October 16, 1870 in Freeport, Ill. , the son of an immigrant banker.

Education

He received a bachelor of arts degree from Johns Hopkins University. After spending a year in the universities at Berlin and Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, he completed his doctorate at Johns Hopkins in 1895.

Career

Bentley was not at home in the formal academic world, serving only a year as a teacher in sociology at the University of Chicago and a brief time 45 years later as visiting professor of philosophy at Columbia University. Instead, he engaged in an unusual series of enterprises, avocations, and scholarly endeavors. He spent 14 years in newspaper work, during which time he published The Process of Government (1908). He lent his financial and administrative skills to the American Red Cross during World War I.

Bentley retired at the age of 40. Being financially independent, he had the leisure to engage in private intellectual pursuits: sociology, politics, philosophy, mathematics, psychology, linguistics, and epistemology.

Bentley's work was developmental. Each successive treatise was more technical, building upon the last and drawing from the work of others. Inevitably, he came to grips with fundamental problems, including the theory of knowledge itself. A tool for research, he saw, must be based upon an epistemology.

John Dewey and Bentley coauthored numerous articles and a book, Knowing and the Known (1960). Bentley's concept of trans-action as a medium of explanation (first acquired in Germany) was brought to maturation in his work with Dewey. In trans-action, systems of description and naming are employed to deal with aspects and phases of action. They held that trans-action was the key to the science of behavior.

He died on May 21, 1957 in Paoli, Indiana.

Achievements

• An early behavioral scientist in America, Arthur F. Bentley was one of the intellectual fathers of contemporary political science. He was a positivist, nonrationalist "group theorist. "
  
  He was the second person to win the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year Award, in 1954.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Condition of the Western Farmer as Illustrated by the Economic History of a Nebraska Township

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • Linguistic analysis of mathematics,

    (Lang:- Eng, Pages 331. Reprinted in 2015 with the help of...)

  • The Process of Government: A Study of Social Pressures

    (Arthur F. Bentley originally wrote this book over the yea...)

  • Behavior, knowledge, fact,
  • Knowing and the Known
  • Relativity in Man and Society

Politics

In 1924 he led the Progressive party in Indiana, and through the years he promoted various agricultural causes.

Bentley scorned traditional political science. His interest was in "action" or "behavior, " not in "mind-stuff. " To him, a group was a way of action in which many men participated; law was activity; government was also activity. He made no distinction between the state and government or between law and government. He thought that the notion of a metaphysical state as an omnipresence behind government bordered on the ridiculous. Sovereignty was at best a legal or theoretical rationalization of behavior—past or proposed. He denied that social behavior was ever inspired by inner voices, faculties, or mind or that there was any such thing as public spiritedness. His strategy for political inquiry was empirical and inductive—his data, external behavior, especially group behavior.

Interests

• He became a fruit grower in Indiana.

References

• John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley: A Philosophical Correspondence, 1932-1951.
• Social science and the idea of process;: The ambiguous legacy of Arthur F. Bentley,