Lasswell, Harold D. (1902–1978)

Harold Dwight Lasswell, recognized by the American Council of Learned Societies as “master of all social sciences and pioneer in each” (Lasswell 1962: back cover), coined the term policy sciences (along with Daniel Lerner) in his indefatigable effort to integrate knowledge with action. Lasswell figured prominently in this interdisciplinary movement for five decades, and made notable contributions to the fields of political science, law and jurisprudence, philosophy, psychology, economics, sociology, anthropology, and communication.

Lasswell was born in Donnellson, Illinois. His father was a Presbyterian minister, and his mother was a schoolteacher. He received his bachelor degree at age twenty years and four years later his doctorate from the University of Chicago. His distinguished career began in 1922 at the University of Chicago, where he was a prime mover in the “behavioral revolution” in political science and a pioneer in other fields of social science. Lasswell was among the first to use Freudian insights to study political behavior, as exemplified by books on world politics and personal insecurity and psychopathology and politics. He was a key figure in the modern literature of propaganda and communication. Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (1936), his introductory book spotlighting the very essence of politics, was extremely popular. His famous communication model—who says what, in which channel, to whom, with what effect?—has been enormously influential.

In 1945, Lasswell joined Yale University as professor of law and political science. He retired in 1970 as Ford Foundation Professor Emeritus of Law and the Social Sciences. After his retirement from Yale, Lasswell became Distinguished Professor of Policy Sciences at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York (CUNY).

At Yale, for over three decades, Lasswell and Myres McDougal (1906–1998) formed an interdisciplinary team of brilliant and enduring collaboration. The partnership of Lasswell and McDougal, a preeminent social scientist and a towering legal scholar, and their associates proved most remarkable in modern intellectual history in terms of creativity, productivity, and impact. From proposals for reform in legal education to studies in world public order and human dignity, their collaboration culminated in the creation of the New Haven School (Policy Science School) of Jurisprudence. Their policy science jurisprudence sought to integrate law, science, and policy, and to bring all available intellectual skills to bear in solving legal problems, in the hope of ultimately establishing a world community of human dignity.

Lasswell's many professional activities included consultative work at the Rand Corporation, with the U.S. Departments of State, Justice, and Agriculture, and with the Committee for Economic Development. During the years 1939 to 1945, he was director of war communications research at the U.S. Library of Congress. Besides holding visiting professorships at leading institutions in the United States, Lasswell researched, taught, and advised in many countries, including Japan, China, India, Peru, and Chile, as well as in London, Geneva, Paris, and Berlin, the European centers where he had pursued his graduate studies in the 1920s.

Lasswell served as president of the American Political Science Association (APSA) and president of the American Society of International Law. His 1956 presidential address for APSA, forward looking and inspiring “possible reconciliation of man's mastery over nature with freedom, the overriding goal of policy in our body politic,” was a major event in the annals of that organization (Lasswell 1956: 961). He was a founder and president of the World Academy of Art and Science, and an early promoter of the United Nations University, now located in Tokyo.

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