the process of government and the governmental process

The Process of Government and The Governmental Process

Grant JordanUniversity of Aberdeen

This review finds little utility in Bentley’s famous The Process of Government. It is asserted that hisbook is cited as a primary source of interest group writing, but in fact, the review argues, that thisprominence is given mainly by those who want to criticise the interest group orientation. Criticscommonly misinterpret the group approach as meaning that policy is the outcome of an interestgroup struggle: such critics seem to find in Bentley that banal and easily discredited position. Thereview argues that in fact Bentley’s stress on group conflict was anything but coincident withinterest group conflict. The charge is unfair on Bentley as it grotesquely simplifies his position andis unfair on the general interest group approach because that perspective is not adequatelysummarised by a distortion of Bentley. In contrast Truman’s The Governmental Process iscommended as raising issues that are strikingly contemporary.

This review compares two contributions, one by A. F. Bentley (1908)1 and theother by David Truman (1951). While the books are often bracketed together, thispiece argues that the latter is of greater contemporary interest. Nonetheless it isBentley’s The Process of Government that is widely accepted as the seminal sourceunderpinning contemporary interest group study. This review argues to the con-trary that Bentley’s arguments are frequently obscure and have contributed littleto the programme of modern interest group research. The image of policy as theresult of crude interest group competition that is habitually taken from The Processof Government is misleading in two ways. It is not a fair summary of the work ofBentley, but nor does this discussion of the alleged weaknesses of Bentley evenapproximate to a criticism of the work of others. This contribution seeks to demon-strate that Bentley’s famous remark ‘When the groups are adequately stated,everything is stated’ was not intended to mean that only interest groups count. Itargues that Bentley is seen as more important by critics of the interest groupliterature than by those contributing more positively to that literature. It tries toaccount for The Process of Government’s inflated reputation: centrally it suggests thatBentley’s work was used to give a theoretical dimension (by supporters andopponents) to a theoretically under-explicit group interpretation of politics thatemerged in the middle third of the century.

There are in fact three broad opinions on the value of Bentley. The first asserts hispivotal position as a Founding Father. In a survey of the ‘Great Men’ (sic) of thediscipline in the United States by Somit and Tanenhaus (1964, p. 66) Bentley wasrecorded as the sixth most prominent political scientist of the pre 1945 period. Theeditor of the 1967 edition of Bentley’s The Process of Government, Peter Odegard,claimed that in the literature of behavioural science it is one of the very fewindispensable books. In the introduction to Bentley’s Inquiry into Inquiries (1954),

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Sidney Ratner said of The Process of Government, ‘Today this book is recognized asone of the great classics in the field of political science, not only for America, butfor the world at large.’ In fact detailed discussion is rare. Bentley’s contributionhas often been reduced to an almost obligatory, but passing, reference in theintroductory sections of many books. A (solitary) point made by Metz (1972) istypical of the manner in which Bentley is handled, ‘Radically reversing theprevailing scholarship of his time, Arthur F. Bentley urged political scientists toturn their attention away from the traditional institutional and legal approach inorder to concentrate on interest group politics.’ Ward (1984, p. 45) makes thepoint that even where Bentley is praised by distinguished scholars, such asCharles Beard, ‘Their comments do not suggest a close reading of the book nordo they indicate awareness of the fundamental problems in social science withwhich Bentley was concerned.’ This review suggests that Bentley actually rose toprominence in the discipline because Truman gave him rather gratuitous creditin his work in 1951. It is simply not the case that succeeding generations ofinterest group scholars went back to the original Bentley and found material ofvalue.

The second view of Bentley, particularly popular among critics of (what they call)group theory, was to accept his work as important, but wrongheaded. Manycitations of The Process of Government are by critics of interest group studies who arehappy to find in 1908 a more convenient target than is currently available.Bentley’s work is repeatedly summarized as a one dimensional explanation (‘statethe groups’) of the political process: this is easily discredited. By attacking Bentley’salleged banality critics also, by association, seek to show the inadequacy of interestgroup explanations in general. This misreading has allowed modern group theoryto be discredited by attacks on the misconstrued Bentley.

The third school of thought is that Bentley has singularly little to do with moderninterest group study. It is this, rather than the Founding Father view, which is thedominant interpretation within the interest group world. According to this ‘curi-osity’ view, Bentley is only of historical and limited interest. So despite the fact thatsome celebrate Bentley as a Founding Father, and he has been discussed withinpolitical theory,2 he has been neglected by the modern interest group community.Indeed he gets the same cursory treatment from those who stress the importanceof groups as he does from those who want to reject their significance. Here theremay be an injustice being done to Bentley by many of those interested in groups.They take The Process of Government from the shelf expecting to find an importantgroup book, but discover it only gets round to an analysis of governmental pressures on page 175; the chapter on group pressures is 23 pages out of 501; and above all, he adopts a different conception of group from that used in inter-est group accounts. So Bentley tends to be dismissed by these interest groupsources because there is not much on interest groups in The Process of Government.What this implies is that while it can be debated whether or not we are dealingwith an important book, it is settled that it is not an important interest groupbook.

Ward (1984, p. xi) is perhaps Bentley’s most sympathetic critic in recent years, buthe is obliged to concede that, ‘The warrant for the study of Bentley must be found

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in the substance of his teaching and not in its influence.’ Somit and Tanenhaus(1967, p. 66) noted that Bentley was not a member of the American PoliticalScience Association and ‘he was almost completely ignored by those who were.’Seidelman (1985, p. 73) legitimately concludes, ‘Those who in the thirties, fortiesand fifties reintroduced the “group theory of politics” into political studies did solargely by ignoring the methodological dilemmas and concerns that led Bentley toquestion the “group” approach of The Process of Government …” (emphasis added).In his Introduction to the 1967 edition, Odegard notes that a 1908 review of theProcess of Government observed that, ‘A hasty reading of some of these chapters failsto impress the reader with their value as a contribution to the literature of politicalscience …’. He points out that not until September 1950 did the American PoliticalScience Review publish a serious discussion of Bentley’s work. Eckstein (1963) andLaPalombara (1960) both find no real link between Bentley and the modern groupapproach; Gunnell (1996, p. 256) observes, ‘Bentley’s The Process of Governmenthas had minimal direct and immediate impact on the discourse of political science…’ and Golembiewski (1960) notes that Bentley is both over praised and overcriticized.

Bentley’s ThesisBentley is usually identified as being a pressure group scholar, but his core ‘group’concept differs from most political science uses. The few passages of his work thatare repeatedly recycled as grounds to dismiss his contribution suggest a simplemessage of crude empiricism, yet the thrust of his work is far from simple. 3 He wasa contributor to psychology, linguistics, and the philosophy of science and know-ledge and not just a simple counter of interest groups. Valid criticism of his work isnot that it was unsophisticated, but that it took exception to so much of thecommon currency of discussion that it dissolves into an idiosyncratic world viewthat cannot be readily shared. As Kress4 argues Bentley’s work evolved both atechnical vocabulary and conceptual categories which grew increasingly intricateand unwieldy, until language itself seemed in need of fundamental reconstruction.

Though Bentley’s famous tag was that ‘This Book is an Attempt to Fashion a Tool’,in fact it was not a DIY manual, but an attack on ruling orthodoxies. It is an import-ant book if it is thought important to reject ‘feelings and faculties’ (Chapter 1),‘ideas and ideals’ (Chapter 11) as explanations of political outcomes, but otherwiseits importance must be questioned. Many of those who have criticized Bentleywould indeed be opposed to the thrust of his opening chapters, but unfortunatelyas Bentley is not read in detail, he is opposed for what it is imagined he must haveintended rather than the case he actually made.

Kress (1970, p. 44) describes the opening chapters of The Process of Government as‘levelling a forest of human error’. Somit and Tanenhaus (1967, p. 66) describe it asa demolitions project. In these passages Bentley savages approaches that hold thatfeelings and ideas are a useful means of explaining what goes on in society. Accord-ing to Odegard (in Bentley, 1967, p. xv), Bentley saw the job of the social scientistto first observe, describe and analyse what human beings do: and then see whatcan be accounted for without bringing in feelings and instincts. In chapter one, for

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example, he points out that concern at specific injustices of bullying children cancoexist with an apparent indifference to child labour or poverty. Similarly he isdissatisfied with an explanation of the banning of bear baiting as being due to anincreased concern for animal welfare − when there are plenty of instances of con-tinuing abuse in other areas, including ‘zoological garden cages’. In the same chap-ter he contrasts the humanity that leaves pigeons safe in the streets – leavingnewsboys sleeping behind garbage boxes in the alleys.

His general complaint is that qualities such as goodness or badness are taken as anexplanation of what actors have done, but if the outcome is not always the samethen the qualities cannot be an explanatory factor. Bentley’s approach is thatunless the complete behaviour is explained by this ‘feeling’ then it, itself, can notbe the explanation. He thought that such sloppy thinking at least dated back toAristotle’s notion that slaves are slaves by nature. He argues that the same error isas common, if less obvious, in modern explanations that rest on feelings, or race orbrain size. He attacks explanations of American history that dealt in terms of theelimination of the ‘cruel, bloodthirsty savages’ – who also were recorded as sharingfoodstuffs in times of need and were so lacking in anti social behaviour that theymore or less lacked a criminal code.

In chapter two Bentley moves on to attack explanations that centre on ideas andideals as explanations of behaviour. He rejects ‘characteristics’ of the Americanpolitical system, such as liberty, the pursuit of happiness, equality, as irrelevant tothe actual behaviour of the politicians, though they might, as a tactical device, seekto invoke these ideals. Among those he (1908, p. 137) condemns are Dicey for histheory that ideas govern history arguing that he, ‘does not succeed in establishingclearly what these ideas are, (he) produces no proof that they have causal workingexcept by citing certain imperfect, inconclusive, and indeed almost irrelevantsequences of events …’ Bentley holds that party ideals and ‘heirloom phrases’ areof negligible importance. He (1908, p. 113) manages to anticipate the current‘decline-of-party’ mood:

Everybody knows how the government moves along much the same withone or other party in power, barring only the specific issues, definitelyfought over in the election. No one is so rash as to try to show a real changein national tendencies according as one or the other party takes power.

However Bentley was too subtle to dismiss the role of ideas or ideals entirely. In hisIntroduction Odegard holds that what he rejected was the notion that they wereindependent variables, standing above and beyond the political process. So idealswhich are not connected to groups and revealed through action seem suspect tohim, though it is difficult to follow his line beyond the proposition that ideals areless important than others had suggested. Odegard argues that Bentley’s was no‘nickel in the slot machine’ analysis of the political process, and while this is trueBentley may have failed in the opposite direction by presenting a case so complexas to be unintelligible.

Odegard’s treatment is more accessible than the original. He goes on to arguethat for Bentley ‘strong groups dominate, displace or destroy weaker groups’and he describes how in the Bentley world-view groups are in a state of constant


activity, pushing and pulling at one another, cooperating, competing, merging ormelting into one another. There is a continual process of adjustments betweengroups, frictions are avoided by ‘rules of the game’ and that by simply looking at conflict we are in danger of missing an important aspect of governance. It is important to note that these units of analysis are not interest groups, but could be anything from the nation state down through official ‘groups’ such as publiclegislatures, courts and administrative agencies. Of course all these propositionscan be criticized, but they are not the simple minded flaws that are usuallyidentified.

Odegard says much of Bentley’s criticism of opponents is ‘harsh and often brutal’.He records that early reviews of The Process of Government concentrated on theknock-about style more than on any originality on offer. A review in The Outlookof May 1908 deplored Bentley’s rudeness to other scholars and criticized part oneof the book as being ‘unnecessarily prolix and technical’. A summary of Bentley’swork seems to be inevitably a summary of his criticism of others. Perhaps onesimply lacks stamina to do more as by the time one has followed Bentley throughhis critique of others one has pursued several hundred difficult pages. However itis also the case that Bentley is clearer in his rejection of the work of others than hispresentation of his own ideas. Odegard (in Bentley, 1967, p. xxii) makes the import-ant point that ‘Bentley himself is not altogether clear what he means by group,interest or process.’ Ideally one might set aside Bentley’s criticism of others and givevital space to setting out Bentley’s own views. However as Kress (above) showsBentley’s style becomes so dense, his rejection of normal terminology so thorough,that one is unclear as to what he is saying – except that it is not the simple ‘pressuregroups are important’ message that is often stuck on him. When struggling withBentley’s prose, it is reassuring to come across Salisbury’s (1975, p. 173) obser-vation that, ‘Bentley’s arguments were metaphorically powerful but analyticallymuddy. One often cannot take him seriously, because it is seldom clear what he meant’(emphasis added). That Bentley is a marginal figure, and that his positive contri-bution is difficult to summarize, are no doubt connected.

How Did it Become a ‘Great Work’?Given the less than enthusiastic comments by reviewers above about The Process ofGovernment how did it attain such a significant reputation? Three suggestions canbe made. The first is that of lack of confidence by academics who wanted to buildup the interest group perspective, but wanted to share the responsibility.LaPalombara (1960, p. 31) notes the observation ‘that the vague and mysticalgroup notions of Bentley have often been borrowed to lend an aura of respect-ability on interest groups conducted in the tradition of journalistic muckrakers orthe ‘‘inside dopesters’’. That the mantle of Bentley’s or anyone else’s “generalgroup theory” does not really fit is unimportant: it does make the interest groupscholar feel less naked.’ So Bentley was perhaps put up on a pedestal becausethose writing on groups felt that having some theoretical underpinning must bebetter than none. Moreover many of the critics come from the guru tradition –Weber, Marx, or whomsoever. They assume that group theory must have a similarwell spring.

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A second reason for Bentley’ reputation is that he supplies good quotes! Thosewho have not read Bentley can still be relied upon to know his provocativesentences:

… when the groups are adequately stated, everything is stated. (p. 208)

The society itself is nothing other than the complex of groups thatcompose it. (p. 222)

All phenomena of government are phenomena of groups pressing oneanother, forming one another, and pushing out new groups … It isonly as we isolate these group activities, determine their representativevalues, and get the whole process stated in terms of them, that weapproach to a satisfactory knowledge of government. (p. 269)

So we have a paradox: The Process of Government is both quotable and unreadable.Furthermore, to make the stylistic inconsistencies even greater, the text is fre-quently knock-about-abuse sitting next to abstract philosophical discourse.

A third reason that Bentley is quoted is because he seems ‘modern’. He himself sawhis work as an attack on formalism and legalistic constitutionalism. Somit andTanenhaus (1982) argue that in the 1890s writings on the subject of politics were,‘legalistic, formalistic, conceptually barren and largely devoid of what today wouldbe called conceptual data.’ (quoted in Lowi, 1992, p. 1.) For them Bentley is part ofa shift to political realism which addressed the gap between formal institutions andpolitical realities. As Odegard notes for Bentley laws or constitutions need not beaccurate descriptions of practice’. Odegard (in Bentley, 1967, p. xx) summarizes,‘Examination of law books may accordingly give only a dim or distorted image ofthe living law … Law on the books not frequently is dead-letter law, unenforcedbecause it no longer adequately reflects the interests of groups powerful enough todemand its enforcement.’ Though Bentley was modern in that he was an empiri-cist, as Garson (1978) and others have argued The Process of Government was not pivotal in transforming the discipline of political science and in moving itfrom a formal legalistic and prescriptive subject to one that was empirical andexplanatory.

What is Group Theory?Bentley is often presented as the founding father of group theory, but thisapproach nowhere exists as a systematic account – and certainly Bentley does notprovide one. (But of course he did not aspire to provide one.) There are many whosee interest groups as significant influences in public policymaking, but they rarelysuggest only interest groups are important. However, ‘group theory’ came, at leastin the eyes of critics, to represent a more extreme position − that policy was solelydetermined by the interaction of interests. An example is Dye’s (1987, pp. 27–8)proposition that:

According to group theorists, public policy at any given time is the equilibrium reached in the group struggle … Group theory purportsto describe all meaningful political activity in terms of the groupstruggle.


Interest group writers have generally resisted the ‘only pressure groups count’ line.Policy is consistently seen as the result of a process of interaction. The relevantpolicy participants (see Jordan et al., 1992) are not always pressure groups in a narrowsense. Though Samuel Beer (1982) described the British political system as ‘newgroup politics’, he stressed (1980) that, ‘No more than in the past do I believe thatpressure groups are the sole or even the principal explanation of what happens inpolitics.’ Latham (1952; 1964) is among the least modest in his expectations abouta group interpretation. For him the legislative vote on any issue tends to representthe composition of strength, i.e. the balance of power among the contending groupsat the moment of voting, but he denies that the legislature plays the inert part of acash register, adding and subtracting the strengths of contending groups. Hewidens the scope of the term ‘group’ in Bentley-like fashion to include legislatures,councils, agencies, departments, and courts. It seems more legitimate to criticizehim not because his group approach misses out large elements of the politicalprocess, but because he has absorbed too many of these elements into his groupcategory: if it is interesting it is a group. Generally, pressure group writers simplydo not try to explain everything by the interaction of formal interest groups,narrowly defined (see Zeigler, 1964, p. iii).

Was Bentley a Group Theorist?Arguably Bentley can be cited as a source of the unqualified, exaggerated form ofgroup theory, but it is far from clear that he supported such an interpretation of thepolitical process. At times, Bentley gives the impression that he was in the businessof describing policy as simply the outcome of lobbying activities by organizedpolitical groups. He suggests that the political process is a sort of measuring activityregistering the balance of group pressures. Discussing Roosevelt and the desertionof the tariff reform platform on which he was elected, Bentley (1908, p. 347)ascribes his failure to act as the result of there not being ‘an intense enough set ofinterest groups (at the) back of the movement to make a good fight for thoroughgoing reform with reasonable prospects of success’. So there is some evidence forthe view that Bentley was a sort of ‘weigh the interests’ student of policy making.Indeed Dowling (1960, p. 946) proposes that Bentley conceived of the politicalprocess in terms of Newtonian physics. He states that Bentley believed that, ‘… thegroup process offers the best and fullest statement of the facts’. Dowling notes thatBentley argues pressure is what counts, but he also observes that technique also hasan important role. Thus Bentley seems to conceive of groups that are strong, butless than fully effectual. The impact of the group apparently depends both onpolitical resources and technique. This notion that there is a ‘real’ strength of agroup that might not be revealed in a particular case, undercuts Bentley’s (1908,p. 214) own emphasis on the reality only of the observable. How is the notion ofobservation reconciled with a belief that we can judge strength in a way that takesinto account technique?

Bentley certainly wished to de-emphasize institutional structures − as the term hasbeen understood in traditional political science. But this is not to say that Bentleyonly saw interest groups in our modern sense as the sole determinants of policy.Admittedly he claimed (1908, p. 260) Government in the broadest sense (not the

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Government) was ‘the process of the adjustment of a set of interest groups’. Butelsewhere (1908, p. 300) he showed that what he termed interest groups were abroader range of bodies than this term now implies:

These range down from the political parties as organized in ‘the govern-ment’ through the parties organized outside of the government, to policyorganizations, citizens’ associations, and political adaptations of non-political groups …

In an epilogue in response to a Festschrift (Taylor, 1957, p. 212) Bentley saidplainly,

I reached an account in terms of ‘group interests’, understanding by this, ofcourse, something far broader in scope than the ‘interest groups’ of conventionalpresentation (emphasis added).

The famous quotation about groups being ‘adequately stated’ actually runs on tomake clear that he was not just talking about the political process, but the socialstructure. ‘The complete description will mean the complete science, in the studyof social phenomena’. The problem for those who know the work of Bentley onlythrough his quotations is that he asks the term ‘political group’ to bear a broadermeaning than is now conventional.

In other words Bentley (1908, pp. 209–10) sees a complex multi-participantprocess; this is not confined to what we would now call interest or pressure groups,‘We shall have to get hold of political institutions, legislatures, courts, executiveofficers, and get them stated as groups, and in terms of other groups. Ward(1984, p. 45) cites Bentley himself noting that those political scientists whoprofessed to be using his work were missing the central point. Bentley (1954,p. 348) himself noted that his study of group pressures in The Process of Gov-ernment was, ‘an inquiry much wider in scope than any study of pressure groups,the “discovery” of which is occasionally attributed to, though emphatically notclaimed by, him’. As Eckstein (1963, p. 390) points out about the work ofBentley and Hagan:

Hagan, like Bentley before him, does not think of groups as if theywere ‘real entities in a certain sense … entities with formal organization,legal existence, constitutions, charters … meeting places, and the like.In ‘group theory’ the idea of the group is entirely an analytical construct(emphasis added).

This point was also clearly made by Salisbury (1975, p. 171) who, referring to thework of Bentley, Latham, Hagan and others, argues that though they saw thegroup, however defined, as the basic unit of observation or description, the ‘idea ofa group in these works is essentially an analytic construct used to order andinterpret observed phenomena and not necessarily identical with what the real worldwould identify as interest groups.’ (emphasis added). In his introduction to Bentley’s1954 volume Ratner noted that Bentley characterized ‘group interests’ in terms ofthe multiple activities and objectives of human beings in contrast to the ‘more staticand limited “interest groups” of contemporary political science.’ As Eckstein (1963,p. 391) pointed out, in the Bentley approach it should be apparent that the theory


is not solely, or even primarily, concerned with the masses of activity that wegenerally call ‘pressure groups’,

Certainly, in asserting that all politics is group conflict, the group theoryof politics says nothing so simple or meaningful, as that all politicaldecisions are decided by the conflict of organized pressure groups.

Gunnell (1993, p. 85) convincingly argues that ‘when Bentley’s ideas about ‘groups’‘took hold in the work of political scientists of the 1950s, the substance and con-cerns were in many respects far removed from those of Bentley himself.’ Ecksteinsuggests that the importance of this kind of formulation was not that it said thatpressure group study accounted for everything, but that it at least allowed pressuregroups to be coequal with other types of participants in the analysis. He goes on,

For better or worse, many political scientists in fact took the grouptheorists to be saying something they took pains not to say: they con-fused the concept of the group in group theory with the more conven-tional meanings attached to the term in their own minds.

As Eckstein allows this ‘gross misunderstanding’ was at least in part caused by thepresentation of the argument by Bentley. As he turns in the later stages of thevolume to empirical material a narrower interpretation of ‘group’ is utilized thanhe suggests in his theoretical accounts.

Truman’s AgendaRelegating Bentley to the margins of the interest group field rather runs against thegenerous tribute made by David Truman in the introduction to The GovernmentalProcess in 1951,

… one book … deserves special mention because it has given the subjectmuch of what systematization it has so far received. That is Arthur F.Bentley’s The Process of Government, first published in 1908 … In fact myplans for this study grew out of my experience in teaching fromBentley’s work.

That Truman deferred to Bentley is, one suspects, a scholar looking for a big brotherand inventing a founding father. After all, just before paying tribute to Bentley inthe Preface, he argues somewhat inconsistently with his tribute to Bentley, thatthere ‘has been no systematic conception of the role of interest groups in thepolitical process’. By downgrading the importance of Bentley for current interestgroup studies one implies that Truman was engaged in an excess of academic goodmanners. Significantly perhaps, Truman (1965, p. 866) discussing the paradigmshift in American political science at the turn of the century, noted that a newtrend, ‘… gradually displaced and was in considerable part a revolt against an oldertradition of … scholastic formalism. The new trend was towards contemporaneityand “facts”, in the name of “realism” and of “science”‘. Truman cited Wilson andBryce rather than Bentley as inspiration. On the last he noted, ‘You will expect meto mention the almost unclassifiable Arthur F. Bentley, who was in but not whollyof the Age of Reform. If Bentley has been misunderstood in the 1950s and 1960s,his work at least has emerged from almost forty years of neglect’. This comment

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does not suggest that Truman found the main structures of his thought in the ‘mis-understood’ and ‘unclassifiable’ Bentley. Dowling (1960, p. 944) pointed out thatTruman’s ‘development’ of Bentley could have been undertaken without anyreference to Bentley at all. Truman explicitly gives credit to case studies, ‘Moreimportant for the purposes of this book are the academic monographs on particularinterest groups, of which there have been a considerable number over the pastthree decades.’ Ward (1984, p. 46) convincingly argues that after World War II TheProcess of Government ‘was rediscovered by a number of American political scientistswho recognized, but misunderstood, Bentley’s programmatic intention.

In his early chapters Truman (for example 1951, p. 24), like Bentley, is broad in hisuse of the term group. He accepts that the term ‘group’ can be used in two sensesand notes that the label categoric group covers all sorts of examples – ‘farmers, alco-holics, insurance men, blondes, illiterates, mothers, neurotics, and so on’. He dis-cusses the need of individuals to be part of a group. However the stress on groupsin social science, he says, occurs when there are relationships among the personsinvolved: a category such as mothers may be a description of a set of individualswho do not interact as mothers. Almost any interaction produces a group. A singlefamily is a group: the idea of ‘interaction’ does not narrow his field by much.Categoric groups can also be groups in the second sense,

groups in the first sense – collections of people with some commoncharacteristic – may be groups in the proper sense if they interact withsome frequency on the basis of their shared characteristic. If a number ofmothers interact with one another as they tackle problems of childtraining, whether through a club or through subscription to a mothers’periodical, they have become a group though the two forms differ instructure and frequency of interaction … It is the interaction that iscrucial, however, not the shared characteristic.

Truman then immediately goes on to signal yet another interpretation when he discusses institutionalized group. Noting the term, ‘does not have a mean-ing sufficiently precise to enable one to state with confidence that one group is an institution whereas another is not’, he nonetheless lists as acceptedexamples,

the courts, legislatures, executives and other political institutions, families,organized churches, manufacturing establishments, transportation sys-tems and organized markets.

He (1951, p. 27) argues that the distinguishing feature of such institutionalizedgroups is ‘almost by definition an equilibrium among the interactions of theparticipants’. However an example of the confusion that Truman courts emergeswhen he seems to restate the same point two pages later, ‘When men act andinteract in consistent patterns, it is reasonable to study these patterns and todesignate them by collective terms: group, institution, nation, legislature, political party,corporation, labour union, family, and so on’. But in the first version all the examplesare institutionalized groups: in the second the ‘group’ is singled out as one of theproducts of interaction. Group in this sense is different from categoric group and asub set of institutionalized group.


The slackness is not a matter of one-off slips. Making his well cited point (1951,p. 33) that society can be seen as a ‘mosaic of groups … a bewildering array ofgroups’, though he had told us that the categoric group did not require interaction,he then concludes, ‘it is an observable fact that all groups involve the same funda-mental process, the interaction of individuals’). The first use of Bentley by Truman(1951, p. 23) was a quotation, ‘Who likes may snip verbal definitions in his old age,when his world has gone crackly and dry’. One can’t help but think that quotationis Truman’s apology for leaving unresolved definitional issues.

Whereas Bentley’s stress on the empirical was in fact overwhelmed by hispreference for demolishing the work of others, Truman’s focus – after he gets hispreliminary remarks out of the way – is on conventionally understood interestgroups. His opening statement in the Preface is, ‘Significant amounts of power arewielded in American politics by those formations usually known as ‘“pressuregroups”’. He stresses that the longest section of the book is Part III (chapters 8–15)‘which deals with the tactics of interest groups’.

Since Bentley had been a Chicago journalist it was almost certainly of significancerather than by oversight that he did not cite muck raking accounts of interest groupactivity. For Truman (1951, p. 11) the observable (and often malign) influence ofgroups was a starting point, ‘In all these situations the fairly observant citizen seesvarious groups slugging it out with one another in pursuit of advantages from theGovernment. Or he sees some of them co operating with one another to theirmutual benefit.’ When Truman turned to interest groups, his attention was on realworld groups (or potential groups): despite the pages in the theoretical sectionabout sociological groups, his text quickly turned to addressing concrete examplesof conventional interest groups. He (1951, p. 43) says, ‘we find that any society iscomposed of groups, the habitual interactions of men. Any society … is a mosaicof overlapping groups of various specialized sorts’, but his empirical material wasabout standard, recognizable, interest group examples.

Like other group writers Truman (1951, p. 51) thought that groups were part ofthe whole: the complete picture however would integrate all these, and other,dimensions. Clearly stated though this is, critics have nonetheless invented a differ-ent version to discredit,

We cannot account for that system by adding up in some fashion theNational Association of Manufacturers, the Congress of Industrial Organ-izations, the American Farm Bureau Federation, the American Legion,and other groups that come to mind when ‘lobbies’ and ‘pressure groups’are mentioned … we must acknowledge that we are dealing with asystem that is not accounted for by the ‘sum’ of the organized interestgroups in the society.

Truman explicitly rejected the version of policy making that, in the hands of critics,became to be regarded as group theory. Rothman (1960) claimed – as if there wasa contrary view – that:

… the study of groups is only one part of the study of politics and not thewhole of it … there is no warrant to assume that the study of politics isthe study of groups.

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Who says otherwise? Truman did not exactly disguise his position with a sectionheaded ‘Difficulties in a Group Interpretation of Politics’. He sets out his goal quiteunambiguously as to build in discussion of the non-party group into the wideraccount of the dynamics of democratic politics. He was self-consciously providinga piece of the puzzle and not a complete alternative picture, ‘The puzzle cannot besolved if some of the pieces are virtually ignored.’ He was emphasizing a neglectedcomponent of the system not the whole. In his note in American Political ScienceReview in 1960 Truman directly addresses Rothman and dismisses the criticism as‘nothing startling’ because he did not recognize the exclusive group explanation inhis own work.

Truman follows Bentley in important ways. He repeatedly stresses that legal andconstitutional structure provides an incomplete statement of the governingprocess. Bentley is mentioned in the index 32 times (albeit 9 are footnotes). Thatnumber of references suggests a close relationship between the works, but if theyare examined systematically, they add up to remarkably little. There is a glancingreference to Bentley’s point that interests must be observed and not ascribed. Henotes that the idea of the ‘state’ and ‘social whole’ are suspect. He credits Bentleywith the observation that individuals have overlapping interests. On page 193 hequotes Bentley’s neat point that ‘Weak leadership is primarily the outcome ofquarrelling interests, not vice versa.’ Quite a few references are of the general ‘cfBentley’ type that actually add little. He notes Bentley’s point that governmentmay well react to incipient group action even before a specific group is mobilizedand exerts pressure. He argues that Bentley recognized that governmental officialscould act in the stead of potential groups – which would only mobilize if they werenot adequately represented by governmental leaders. In total the references toBentley can be brought together in about one page.

An unexpected benefit of looking at the specific references to Bentley is that itreveals the effort that Truman appears to have put in, without success, to findmaterial in Bentley that would perhaps mask a different emphasis between theauthors. Truman as part of his rejection of a too simple, group-is-all accountwanted to argue that policy was not simply made as the result of the interplay ofpowerful interest groups. He (1951, p. 515) said:

In a relatively vigorous political system, however, these unorganizedinterests are dominant with sufficient frequency in the behavior of enoughimportant segments of the society so that … both the activity and themethods of organized interests are kept within broad limits.

His argument was that the system was one in which politicians and officials limitedthe power of the organized by defending the interests of the potential and un-organized groups. Truman tries to justify this as a theme borrowed from Bentley,but it is hard to reconcile with Bentley’s suspicion of the potential interest as afactor.

Truman’s contemporary value is considerable and does not rely on his refer-ences back to Bentley. He looks at length at the implications of overlappinggroup membership – not remote from our current interest in social capital. He also looks at the role of leaders in groups; the relations between groups and


bureaucracy; the long run effects of the media; group origins and the links betweengroups and political parties. These are topics that interest modern group theoristsand they are clearly expressed in a language that can be understood. Truman setout that his role was not simply to describe and celebrate, and emphasized thatthe purpose of the study of groups was to seek correctives, protections and controlsthat strengthen the practices essential to what we call democracy. He (1951, p. 12)argued, ‘We shall not begin to achieve control until we have arrived at a con-ception of politics that adequately accounts for the operations of political groups.’The questions he posed near enough 50 years ago are still relevant.

What are the connections between the increased complexity of gov-ernmental operations … and the recent increases in the number oforganized groups? Why have particular types of political groups becomeincreasingly numerous and active? Why and under what circumstancesdo organized groups become involved in the operation of government?… we shall note that the character of a group’s relationship to thegoverning process is in part a function of the group’s internal structure… What features … tend to maximize the influence of organized groupsand what features, if any, operate to confine the activities of such groupswithin tolerable limits.(1951, p. 13) How do interest groups emerge?Under what circumstances do they make claims upon or through theinstitutions of government (1951, p. 65).

In short, a student of interest groups will inevitably find much more use in Truman(1951) than Bentley (1908). Bentley has an occasionally powerful turn of phrase,but his presentation is so dense that a reader finds difficulty in getting a starting pointto criticize. However one weakness that is not found in his work is naive grouptheory: he did not believe that policy was determined by interest group interaction.Truman is richer, more readable, simpler. If the utility of the group approach is tobe debated, discussion should be centred on the work of Truman not Bentley.

About the Author

Grant Jordan, Department of Politics and international Relations, University of Aberdeen, OldAberdeen AB24 3QY, Scotland; email [email protected]

Notes1 There is overlap with the author’s ‘The relevance of Bentley for Group Theory,’ History of the Human

Sciences, 12, (1999), 27–54.

2 Gunnell, 1993; Seidelman,1985; Taylor,1957; White, 1957; Jacobson,1964.

3 Relativity in Man and Society (Putnam’s Sons, 1926); Linguistic Analysis of Mathematics (Principia Press,1932), Behavior, Knowledge and Fact (Principia Press, 1936); (with John Dewey) Knowing and the Known(Beacon Press,1935).

4 Unpublished: quoted by Odegard in Bentley, 1967, ‘Introduction, p. xxxviii.

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Gunnell, J. (1993) The Descent of Political Theory. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Jordan, G., Maloney, W. and McLaughlin, A. (1992) ‘What is studied when pressure groups are studied?’,British Interest Group Project Working Paper Series Number 1, Department of Politics and IR, University ofAberdeen.

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Zeigler, H. (1964) Interest Groups in American Society. Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall.


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