Arthur Fisher Bentley was born on October 16, 1870, in Freeport, Illinois, to Charles Frederick Bentley and Angeline Alice Fisher. In 1880, the Bentley family moved to Nebraska where Arthur Fisher spent much of his childhood and worked for some time in his father's bank. He studied the social sciences, particularly economics and sociology, at Johns Hopkins University and received a bachelor's degree in 1892 and a doctoral degree in 1895. Bentley also studied for a year in Europe and attended lectures at the Universities of Berlin and Freiberg im Breisgau. After completing his education, Bentley worked as a sociology professor at the University of Chicago, where he met his longtime collaborator John Dewey, 1859-1952. After only a year of teaching, Bentley decided academia did not suit him, and he instead became a journalist for the Chicago Times-Herald (later, the Record-Herald). In 1899, he married his first wife, physician Anna Harrison.

While writing for the Chicago Times-Herald, Bentley found the time to author the influential text The Process of Government: A Study of Social Pressures (1908). Two years later, he retired to his apple orchard in Paoli, Indiana, to devote himself to researching and writing about political and social theory. While running the orchard, Bentley wrote Makers, Users and Masters (1920; published 1969); Relativity in Man and Society (1926), which applied theoretical physics and mathematics to social theory; The Linguistic Analysis of Mathematics (1932), which examined scientific notation through the lens of linguistics; and Behavior, Knowledge, Fact (1935). He also frequently collaborated with fellow philosopher John Dewey, and their articles were published as a collection titled Knowing and the Known (1949). During World War I, Bentley was a member of the American Red Cross and later became active in the Progressive political party, helping to manage Robert LaFollette's campaign for president. Following the death of his first wife, he married Susan W. Chipman in 1930; after Chipman passed away in 1942, Bentley married his third and final wife, the businesswoman Imogene M. Shaw, in 1946. Bentley briefly returned to academia in 1941-1942, teaching philosophy at Columbia University, but he ultimately came back to his orchard in Paoli, IN. He died there on May 21, 1957, at the age of 86.