Harold Dwight Lasswell (1902-1978)

Abstract

HAROLD D. LASSWELL ranks among the half dozen cre- ative innovators in the social sciences in the twentieth century. Few would 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 carried out a re- search program demonstrating the importance of personal- ity, social structure, and culture in the explanation of political phenomena. In the course of that work he employed an array of methodologies that included clinical and other kinds of interviewing, content analysis, para-experimental tech- niques, and statistical measurement. It is noteworthy that two decades were to elapse before this kind of research program and methodology became the common property of a disci- pline that until then had been dominated by historical, legal, and philosophical methods. Lasswell was born in 1902 in Donnellson, Illinois (popu- lation ca. 300). His father was a Presbyterian clergyman, his mother, a teacher; an older brother died in childhood. His early family life was spent in small towns in Illinois and In- diana as his father moved from one pulpit to another, and it stressed intellectual and religious values. Although the re- gional milieu of his childhood and adolescence might suggest that Lasswell was raised in an intellectual backwater, in fact