Biographical Memoirs Volume 57 (1987) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
Harold Dwight Lasswell
Harold Dwight Lasswell
Pages 248-275
The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.
From page 249... ...
Few wouIct question that he was the most original and productive political scientist of his time. While still in his twenties and early thirties, he planned and carrie(1 out a research program demonstrating the importance of personality, social structure, ant!
|
From page 250... ...
in aclolescence by a physician uncle who was familiar with the works of Freucl; by an English teacher in the Decatur, Illinois, high school he attendect who introduced him to Karl Marx and Havelock Ellis; and by a brilliant young teacher of high school civics, William Cornell Casey, who later became a professor of sociology at Barnard College in Columbia University. He excelled in high school, edited the school newspaper, gave the valectictory address at gracluation, and was awarclect a scholarship to the University of Chicago after winning a competitive examination in modern history and English.
|
From page 251... ...
In the immediate aftermath of this stucly and during Lasswell's graduate student (lays, HaroIct Foote Gosnel1 (then a first-term assistant professor of political science) conducted!
|
From page 252... ...
Lasswell tract done fielct research in Europe for this stucly, interviewing scholars and governmental officials regarding aspects of the propaganda experience a-cl the Great War. He also anticipated his later invention of content analysis in a simple quantitative study "Prussian School2 "Current Public Opinion and the Public Service Commissions," in: Public Utility Regulation, ed.
|
From page 253... ...
(In the study Lasswell counted ant! evaluated the significance of the references to national superiority, military glory, foreign inferiority, military heroes, and the like in textbooks approved by the Prussian Ministry of Education after the establishment of the Weimar Republic.~3 Lasswell was appointed assistant professor of political science at Chicago in 1926 and soon embarked on researches in political psychology.
|
From page 254... ...
l~asswell was already in communication with anthropologist Edward Sapir, then a colleague at the University of Chicago, as well as with the New York psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan. The three of them began to plan an ambitious program of culture and personality research in the middle and late 1920s.
|
From page 255... ...
or was a rhetorical exaggeration to draw attention to the importance of psychological motivation in the explanation of political phenomena. Supporting the reductionist position is the fact that the Freudian movement at this time took a similarly reductionist stanct in the explanation of social, political, and aesthetic phenomena.
|
From page 256... ...
Chapters 12 and 13 "The Personality System and Its Substantive Reactions" and "The State as a Manifold of Events" presented Lasswell's framework of politically relevant variables and a strategy of political explanation, which moves from intrapsychic processes anc! their etiology, to interpersonal and social processes, to domestic and international political processes, and back again.
|
From page 257... ...
AdvisecI and encouraged by psychiatrists Harry Stack Sullivan of Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital and William A White of St.
|
From page 258... ...
He did not begin to clear explicitly with the political value and public policy realm until his association with Myres McDougal and the Yale School of Law in the late 1930s. The bulk of World Politics and Personal Insecurity illustrates his method ant]
|
From page 259... ...
of communications ancT public opinion research. In an effort to implement the research program laicl out in World Politics, Lasswell anct a number of his graduate students carried out a field stucly of propagancia and political agitators and organizers among the unemployed in the city of Chicago during the depression anct New Deal years.
|
From page 260... ...
Hutchins's conception of political science was humanistic, deductive, even Aquinian. Although Lasswell had tenure as ctid Gosnell both men left the University: Lasswell in 1938 for Washington, D.C., and the William Alanson White Psychiatric Foundation; Gosnell a few years later, also to the capital but for government service.
|
From page 261... ...
The research institute never came to fruition, but these encounters surely influenced Lasswell's program at the University of Chicago, Sapir's Institute of Human Relations at Yale, ant! Sullivan's William Alanson White Psychiatric Foundation in Washington, D.C.
|
From page 262... ...
Lasswell gave expert testimony in a number of trials under this legislation; he was also instrumental in the effort to have quantitative content analysis acimittect as evidence in the federal courts. During the war years he played an active role as a consultant to the Office of Facts and Figures and its successor organization, the Office of War Information; the Office of Strategic Services; the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service of the Federal Communications Commission; and the Army's Psychological Warfare Branch.
|
From page 263... ...
It was a project of immense proportions anct was set aside in the war years in favor of a much more modest program of propaganda analysis located in the Office of War Information and the Federal Communications Commission. But in the aftermath of the war and working with wartime collaborators particularly sociologist Daniel Lerner anct political scientist Ithie} Pool Lasswell pursued these research themes.
|
From page 264... ...
The monograph argued that lawyers were the principal policymakers in modern democratic societies and that traditional law school curricula failed to provide training for the variety of policymaking roles lawyers were called upon to perform. In this seminal article, Lasswell ancT McDougal sought to remedy these shortcomings.
|
From page 265... ...
VIasic, ~9631; and Human Rights and World Public Order: The Basic Policies of an International Law of Human Dignity (with McDougal and Lung-chu Chen, 19801. A final volume, entitled Jurisprudence for a Free Society: Studies in Law, Science, and Policy and coauthored with McDougal, is still to appear.
|
From page 266... ...
His monograph on the decision process (1956) spelled out more clearly his theoretical framework for the phases of policymaking ancT implementation cliscussed above.
|
From page 267... ...
He served as president of the American Political Science Association in 1956 and of the American Society of International Law from 1966 to 1968. He received honorary degrees from the University of Chicago, Columbia University, the University of Illinois, ancT the Jewish Theological Seminary.
|
From page 268... ...
Arnold Rogow, 1969~; the memorial volume, Harold Dwight Lasswell 1902— 1978, which was published by the Yale Law School under the editorship of Myres McDougal; and Helen Swick Perry's Psychiatrist of America: The Life of Harry Stack Sullivan (1982) , which contains information on the early collaboration of Lasswell with Sapir and Sullivan; and from personal communications and accounts provided by William T
|
From page 269... ...
Problem of adequate personality records: A proposal.
|
From page 270... ...
1943 With Myres McDougall Legal education and public policy: Professional training in the public interest.
|
From page 271... ...
Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. With Daniel Lerner and Ithiel de Sola Pool.
|
From page 272... ...
Law, 53: 1-29. 1960 With Myres McDougall Studies in World Public Order.
|
From page 273... ...
The Interpretation of Agreements and World Public Order: Principles of Content and Procedure. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.
|
From page 274... ...
New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. With Daniel Lerner and Hans Speier, eds.
|
Key Terms
This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More
information on Chapter Skim is available.