He taught at the University of Chicago for one year (1895–1896) and then decided to become a reporter. Later, he transitioned into editorial work at two Chicago papers, the
Times-Herald and the
Record-Herald. He left Chicago and life as a reporter in 1911, claiming poor health, and moved to a farm near
Paoli, Indiana, where he lived for the rest of his life. The son of a successful banker, Bentley was able to finance his life as a scholar without having to work for an income. He was the second person to win the
American Humanist Association's
Humanist of the Year Award, in 1954. His later work was shaped by a close collaboration with
John Dewey.
Orientation 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 and interest-group approaches.
Work The Process of Government, first published in 1908 and still in print today, had much influence on political science from the 1930s to the 1950s. "The Human Skin: Philosophy's Last Line of Defense" was published in
Philosophy of Science (Bentley, 1941). In 1949, he co-authored
Knowing and the Known, a series of papers on
epistemology, with John Dewey. == Publications ==