Arthur F. Bentley

Arthur Fisher Bentley (October 16, 1870 in Freeport, Illinois – May 21, 1957 in Paoli, Indiana) 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. He received his Bachelor of Arts 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. 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...