The son of a successful banker, Bentley was able to finance his life as a scholar without having to work for an income.
Bentley held that interactions of groups are the basis of political life, and rejected statist abstractions.
His tenet that "social movements are brought about by group interaction" is a basic feature of contemporary pluralist and interest-group approaches.
[7] 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.
[1] Bentley's papers, including his correspondence with Dewey, are kept in archives at Indiana University.