Political Research Quarterly Volume XX Number X Month XXXX xx-xx © 2008 University of Utah 10.1177/1065912908317029 http://prq.sagepub.com hosted at http://online.sagepub.com 1 “Interest” Is a Verb Arthur Bentley and the Language of Interest Dean Mathiowetz University of California, Santa Cruz The hundredth anniversary of Arthur Bentley’s The Process of Government is an occasion to recover his distinctive but forgotten view of interest, namely, that an appeal to “interest” is an activity of provoking political identity and agency—an activity exemplified by the “group process” of politics. Bentley’s insight has been lost as students of politics, as diversely inclined as David Truman, Bill Connolly, and many others, approach interests instead as a psychological bulwark and expression of sovereign agency. Reading Bentley prompts us to see how the language of “interest” undercuts such a picture, encouraging instead a critical theory of interests—and of politics more generally—that is sensitive to the active provocation of identity at sites of contestation. Keywords: agency; action; Bentley; concepts; Connolly; contestation; grammar; groups; interest; language; political theory; social science; Truman T he concept of interests has long both seduced and troubled political inquiry. Students of politics want to know the interests of the persons they study. Liberals and “empirical” social scientists have been particularly keen to avoid ascribing interests, on the view that such ascriptions imposed an ideological order on persons, denying their freedom and agency rather than observing them “as they are” (Schubert 1961; Sorauf 1962; Downs 1962; Held 1970; Balbus 1971; Flathman 1966). But how to know these inter- ests without ascribing them is not altogether clear. While empirical studies are meant to merely observe peoples’ interests (e.g., in their actions, like voting or filling out a survey), such an observation has an often-unacknowledged normative and even ascriptive side in its commitment to respecting an individual person’s determinations of her own interests. Therefore, even positivist empirical studies define interests in such a way as to hold, however implicitly, that a person’s “real interest” lies in her sovereign agency–a term we may use to describe the subject’s “condition of being an independent, self-determining agent” bearing “the aspiration to be able to act inde- pendently” (Markell 2003: 11-12). Observing inter- ests in the course of studying politics, therefore, has in practice meant studying the behaviors of individual persons who are presumed, from the outset, to be in some critical respect autonomous. 1 But the term “interest” has turned out to be ill- suited for respecting sovereign agency in political inquiry, since even these observations of interest- revealing actions and behaviors are so easily and per- sistently dogged by questions of whether persons always do what’s in their interests—a question vividly illustrated by the hand-wringing reflected in What’s the Matter with Kansas? (Frank 2004). Critical theory has relentlessly pressed forward the question of whether persons can be said to act in or even know their interests, given social circumstances that impede the autonomy and agency that a notion of interest is meant to secure. Meanwhile interest has gone out of style in the study of politics as one after another ascendant approach in political science abandons “interest” as too fuzzy for its scientific aspirations, and advances instead other terms and foundations. These days, rational choice theorists cite agents’ Author’s Note: First, I am grateful to the students in my Winter 2005 senior seminar at UCSC. Their unexpected enthusiasm for Bentley encouraged me to read him in a new light. I presented the first pass of this reading at the annual meeting of the Western Political Science Association in Spring 2005. I thank those who worked on and attended that panel, including William Connolly, Elisabeth Ellis, Jennet Kirkpatrick, and Ron Schmidt, Jr., for their questions and remarks. Douglas Dow and Stephen Englemann also participated in this discussion and many others on the long road from paper to essay. Thanks also to Mark Anderson, Wendy Brown, Mary Dietz, Patchen Markell, Megan Thomas, Benjamin Read,Vanita Seth, and Daniel Wirls for various kinds of help, and to the anonymous reviewers of Political Research Quarterly for their insights and suggestions. This essay’s errors, shortcomings, and omissions are all mine. Political Research Quarterly OnlineFirst, published on April 23, 2008 as doi:10.1177/1065912908317029 Copyright 2008 by University of Utah.