Lasswell, Harold (1902–1978)

Harold Dwight Lasswell was a political scientist who taught at the University of Chicago from 1924 to 1938. He entered the University of Chicago as an undergraduate at the age of 16 and completed his PhD at the same institution. He later moved to the Yale Law School, where he taught from 1945 to 1975. Lasswell's work was especially influential with respect to the conceptualization of power during the first two decades after World War II. Both Robert Dahl and Herbert Simon explicitly acknowledged their intellectual debt to his work on power. Although Lasswell made many contributions to the social sciences, including defending behaviorism and making vital contributions to communications research and policy science, his most important contribution to research on power was Power and Society: A Framework for Political Inquiry, written in collaboration with the philosopher Abraham Kaplan. Written as part of a wartime research project sponsored by the U.S. Library of Congress, this work was completed in 1945 but was not published until 1950.

Lasswell and Kaplan depicted power as triadic in the sense that specification of a power relationship requires attention to scope, weight, and domain. They portrayed power as a relation among humans rather than as a property of a person or group. They identified eight base values that could underlie a power relation—wealth, respect, power, rectitude, affection, well-being, skill, and enlightenment—while denying that any of these was more fundamental than the others. A base value was defined as a causal condition of the exercise of power. Lasswell and Kaplan distinguished between power and influence by associating severe negative sanctions with the former.

Although Lasswell and Kaplan were attempting to lay conceptual foundations for a rigorous scientific study of power, they denied that this would lead to universal truths. Instead, they emphasized the importance of embedding scientific research on power in a particular context. They argued that the forms of power are likely to vary from one age to another, from one culture to another, and within a culture from one structure to another.