Can We Separate “Interest Groups” from Education Politics? A Book Review 100 Years LaterArthur F. Bentley, The Process of Government: A Study of Social Pressures. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press [1908], 3rd ed., 1995), 533 pp., $22.45 (paper).

Abstract

Arthur Fisher Bentley (1870–1957) is a political theorist and the author of The Process of Government: A Study of Social Pressures. Published 100 years ago, this classic analysis bears revisiting and reapplying to more contemporary studies of the politics of education in the United States. Since Bentley’s book appeared (and since he was revered as the most important political analyst of his generation), education politics has moved toward more postmodern and market views. Recently, however, Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism, discussed Bentley’s continued importance to our field in the New Yorker magazine (2008). In this fascinating article, Lemann noted, concerning Bentley’s work, that “2008 is the centenary of a curious and mesmerizing book that was long considered the most important study of politics and society ever produced in the United States” (86) As Dowling (1960) explains, Bentley’s work was “modeled on the physicists’ conception of a closed system in which forces within the system are so arranged that the resultant at every point is zero” (947). In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Bentley fell out of favor and practically disappeared from theoretical discussions as pluralism and group politics were either assumed to be too mechanistic, predetermined, and closed as a system or were denied altogether. Bentley is less well known now, in part because his notions are antithetical to the prevailing existential, liberal, and progressive notions