An early behavioral scientist in America, Arthur F. Bentley (1870-1957) was one of the intellectual fathers of contemporary political science. He was a positivist, nonrationalist "group theorist."

Arthur Bentley was born in Freeport, Ill., the son of an immigrant banker. 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.

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...