Arthur F. Bentley (1870–1957)

I think I discovered this book via another book called Democracy for Realists. The author of Democracy for Realists hailed this work as a unique contribution to government theory which still provides timely insights, even though it's over a hundred years old. Now that I have read this book, I can agree with that assessment. This book is worth reading because the ideas it presents make a lot of sense even though they differ from mainstream political theory, which proceeded in other directions in the 20th century.

The author's main idea is that all government, whether it be by democracy, by limited monarchy or by despotism, is in the end a group activity. People live and act in groups, not alone. Those groups set their own objectives and defend their interests and ideals, disagree, negotiate and compromise in the process of government. Under almost any form of government, some groups will be formally excluded. But even the excluded will have some indirect influence, however weak it may be. Even the actions of a particular presidents or government agencies should be understood as group activities.

This seems like a reasonably good insight, and it alone makes this book worth reading. However, the author's presentation and analysis do have some faults. Firstly, at nearly 500 pages, the book is far too long. The first 160 pages provide an extensive critique of previous works which ends in the conclusion that "activities" should be the central focus of social research. This century-old literature review doesn't hold much interest today, and the author's concept of "activity" is not explicated in a particularly clear manner.

Furthermore, even though the author gives some examples of how the process of government works through group activities, I would have hoped for a little bit more, both in terms of theoretical clarity and practical example. It seems like the author repeatedly returns to the same conclusion: "this is group activity", without either taking a step back toward more general explanation or explaining how these groups actually fight, cooperate and compromise with each other. He must have considered practical matters to be questions of detail which can only be studied on a case-by-case basis, but one or two more steps in the direction of more general explanations could also have facilitated better examples.

Nevertheless, I will certainly return to selected sections of this book in the future just to see what it had to say.… (más)