Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-wq484 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-29T23:53:55.574Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Cosmology of Arthur F. Bentley*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Myron Q. Hale
Myron Q. Hale*
Affiliation:
The Ohio State University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

“Realism” in systematic political science in this country began to emerge, in a reaction against the inadequacies of legal and institutional description, early in this century. David Easton, remarking the change, cites in evidence Arthur F. Bentley's attempt “to fashion a tool.” By midcentury, it may be said, Bentleyism is tooling the fashion. A recent commentator, deploring the current emphasis on methods and measurements, declares the new orthodoxy has left its mark on the profession no less than on the world and is partially responsible for our failure to identify and solve social problems. Yet, for all the talk about Bentley's influence, and despite the social significance of his ideas, there has been too little study of his theory of politics. I propose to examine his writings as those of a “realist” and to show how his search for both “realism” and a “science of politics” may lead to a surreptitious sanctification of the actual. In short, in this paper I shall argue that the implications of Bentley's cosmology are conservative.

Bentley's political work had an ulterior end; it was not pure curiosity. “My interest in politics,” he said, “is not primary, but derived from my interest in the economic life, and … I hope from this point of approach ultimately to gain a better understanding of the economic life than I have succeeded in gaining hitherto.” The terms of his solution, expressed first in The Process of Government, reflected his understanding of the early twentieth-century midwestern social and economic structure. Influenced by social Darwinism and sociological realism, and rejecting legal and judicial formalism, Bentley advanced what could be called a “functional” theory, based upon what he later called the “transactional approach.”

Type
Bentley Revisited
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 54 , Issue 4 , December 1960 , pp. 955 - 961
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1960

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

A revision of a paper presented at the Midwest Conference of Political Scientists, April 28–29, 1960.

References

1 The Political System (New York, 1953).

2 Rogow, Arnold A., “Comment on Smith and Apter, or Whatever Happened to the Great Issues,” this Review, Vol. 51 (September, 1957), p. 771.Google Scholar

3 The writer's perspective derived from a recently completed study, “American Conservatism: Conventionalism, Historicism, Functionalism” (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1958.)

4 The Process of Government, a Study of Social Pressures (Chicago, 1908), p. 210.

5 Dewey, John, Reconstruction in Philosophy (New York, 1950), p. 64.Google Scholar

6 Ibid., p. 67.

7 See his article on “Functionalism,” Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (Seligman, Edwin R. A., ed.), VI, 523–525.Google Scholar

8 Durkheim, Emile, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (New York, 1915).Google Scholar

9 Ashley-Montagu, , Darwin, Competition and Cooperation (New York, 1952).Google Scholar

10 Frank, Jerome, “A Conflict with Oblivion: Some Observations on the Founders of Legal Pragmatism,” Rutgers Law Review, Winter, 1954, pp. 425–463.Google Scholar

11 Quoted by Ratner, Sidney in Taylor, Richard W., ed., Essays in Honor of Arthur F. Bentley: Life, Language, Law. (Yellow Springs, 1957), p. 53.Google Scholar

12 The Process of Government, pp. 1–18. It could be argued that Bentley belonged among the antiformalists whose influence for decades was not conservative.

13 See Ratner, in Taylor, op. cit., p. 35.

14 See Moore, Barrington Jr., Political Power and Social Theory (Cambridge, 1958), pp. 90–110.Google Scholar

15 The Nature of Physical Theory (New York, 1936).

16 Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (New York, 1938).

17 See The Process of Government, pp. 208, 465–482 for his statements on socialism, Marx, and a class analysis of society. Bentley claims that Marx's analysis lacked validity because the class did not possess unity as the group did.

18 Engels in his Anti-Dühring undertook this task; see Engels, Frederick, Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science (New York, 1939).Google Scholar

19 The Condition of the Western Farmer as Illustrated by the Economic History of a Nebraska Township, John Hopkins University Studies in History and Political Science, Vol. II (Baltimore, 1893), p. 10.

20 Relativity in Man and Society (New York, 1926), pp. 205–206. “Let the test of every phase of society be in terms of some other phase or phases.”

21 Knowing and the Known (Boston, 1949).

22 Inquiry into Inquiries: Essays in Social Theory (Boston, 1954).

23 Knowing and the Known, p. 108. On pp. 72–74, they defined the transactional approach as “functional observation of the full system, actively necessary to inquiry at some stages, held in reserve at other stages, frequently requiring the breaking down of older verbal impactions of naming. … Interaction is presentation of particles or other objects organized as operating upon one another. Self-action is pre-scientific presentation in terms of presumptively independent actors, souls, minds, selves, power, or forces, taken as activating events. … If we confine ourselves to the problem of the balls on a billiard table they can be profitably presented and studied interactionally. But a cultural account of the game in its full spread of social growth and human adaptation is already transactional.”

24 Cornford, Francis, The Laws of Motion in Ancient Thought (Cambridge, 1931).Google Scholar

25 “Knowledge and Society,” in Inquiry into Inquiries, pp. 12–24. On page 20: “Our task now is to take the Dewey theory of knowledge as arising at crises of action and broaden it out, so that it will be explicitly stated in terms of more than individual lives.” Bentley does this by reducing the individual to a segment of “taxioplasm,” an inseparable part of a society which canbe properly comprehended only within a system which embraces also the physical environment. On page 18: “The wolf fighting with the pack over the too-limited quarry is as much symbiotactic as when previously it was running down the prey.” Synbiotaxis is the total process or function; it follows that the prey is symbiotactic too.

26 Ibid., p. 25.

27 Bentley, Arthur F., Behavior, Knowledge, Fact (Bloomington, 1935), p. 183.Google Scholar

28 Bridgman, , The Nature of Physical Theory (Princeton, 1936), p. 183.Google Scholar

29 Inquiry into Inquiries, pp. 113–140.

30 Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy.

31 P. 429.

32 Ibid., p. 215.

33 I am indebted to Professor Arthur W. Macmahon for this epithet. He suggested that American political scientists who since 1946 have become interested in responsible party government and the issues of politics should have discredited, not resuscitated, Bentley.

34 The Process of Government, page 241: “Each group … will bolster up its claim on an elaborate structure of reasoning and assertions. … When we go down to the group statement we get down below mere reasoning to the very basis of reasons.”

35 Bentley put no limitations on the validity of the transactional approach and group theory as a methodology to understand politics, since he had to his own satisfaction reduced political phenomena to processes in a system and groups. See The Process of Government, pp. 208–209: “When groups are adequately stated, everything is stated. When I say everything I mean everything. The complete description will mean the complete science, in the study of social phenomena, as in any other field. There will be no more room for animistic ‘causes’ here than there.”

36 It is just at this point that many behavioralists begin their analysis.

37 Bentley, , The Process of Government, p. 271.Google Scholar “No slavee, not the worst abused of all, but help to form the government. They are an interest group within it.” This is hard to reconcile with his refusal to admit Marx's classes as groups.

38 Ibid., pp. 219–254.

39 Op. cit., p. 46.

40 See The Process of Government, p. 443: “All of the groups … have value in terms of each other, just as have the colors in a painting, or sounds in music. … There is not a bit of the process that does not have its meaning in terms of other parts.”

41 See Relativity in Man and Society, pp. 119–120: “The term state indicates a great complex of closely coinciding activities, which hold together, and get enough representative process for stability. The state is fundamental not as a mystic being but only in the sense of this stability, this durational extent, this relative permanence.”

42 See The Process of Government, pp. 234–38. Bentley contends that a group representing subgroups and reflecting a common economic interest transforms itself into a hierarchically organized aristocratic machine of government, and the group struggle follows: a natural aristocracy opposed by a natural demogogy. A natural aristocracy generates a natural demagogic group movement.

43 Ibid., p. 443.

44 Ibid., p. 358.

45 Ibid., pp. 301, 358–59, 449–58. Not only did he feel that government or the American Republic was “out of adjustment,” but that we had not modeled a system of government to meet our needs, and that democracy or representative democracy was a “structural arrangement” which would prevent groups from obtaining a “disproportionate power of functioning through government.”

46 See Inquiry into Inquiries, p. 344: “Behavioral pasts and futures—histories and goals, habits and purposings—are before us descriptively in behavioral presents.”

47 See The Process of Government, pp. 192–3, where Bentley said that if a comparison of group activity were made, “we shall have the human nature and the environment comprised in our very statement of the activities themselves—the actual happenings.”

48 See Relativity in Man and Society, pp. 139, 205–6; also Inquiry into Inquiries, p. 24.

49 The Process of Government, p. 458.

50 Not all “group theorists,” however, have been bound by his system. I would clearly distinguish between Bentley and the work of Professor David Truman.

51 The Political Economy of Growth (New York, 1957).