- In full:
- Harold Dwight Lasswell
- Born:
- February 13, 1902, Donnellson, Illinois, U.S.
- Died:
- December 18, 1978, New York, New York (aged 76)
- Subjects Of Study:
- personality
- political power
Harold Lasswell
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Who was Harold Lasswell?
Harold Lasswell (1902–1978) was an influential American political scientist known for his studies of power relations, personality, and politics, and for his contributions to behavioral political science. He defined political science as the study of changes in the distribution of value patterns in society, with power dynamics as the focal point of his analysis.
Lasswell authored over 30 books and 250 scholarly articles on subjects such as psychoanalysis, international relations, and legal education. His works include Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (1936) and Power and Society: A Framework for Political Inquiry (1950). Lasswell also contributed to communication theory with his question, "Who says what to whom with what effect?".
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What is Harold Lasswell known for in political science?
Harold Lasswell (1902–1978) was an influential American political scientist known for his studies of power relations, personality and politics, and contributions to behavioral political science. Lasswell viewed political science as the study of changes in the distribution of value patterns in society. He defined values as desired goals and power as the ability to participate in decisions, viewing political power as the ability to produce intended effects on other people. His book Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (1936) is his most well known work. Lasswell is also known for posing the question, "Who says what to whom with what effect?".
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What key ideas did Lasswell contribute to the study of politics?
Harold Lasswell was an influential political scientist known for his studies of power relations, personality and politics, and contributions to behavioral political science. He viewed political science as the study of changes in the distribution of value patterns in society, with power dynamics as the focal point.
His key ideas include:
* Defining politics as "who gets what, when, how".
* Examining power dynamics between elites and the general population.
* Studying political psychology and the desire for domination.
* Advocating for a science of social policy to serve the democratic will for justice.
* Contributing to systems theory, functional and role analysis, and content analysis in political science.
* Analyzing propaganda techniques used during World War I.2 Britannica SourcesCreated from Britannica articles using AI. AI can make mistakes, so verify using Britannica articles. -
What is Lasswell's famous model of communication?
Harold Lasswell, an influential American political scientist, is known for his model of communication, which addresses the question, "Who says what to whom with what effect?". This query emphasizes the key elements of the communication process and has been widely discussed across various disciplines.
In response to Lasswell's question, a schematic model of a communications system emerged in the late 1940s from mathematicians Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver. The model contains an information source, a transmitter, a channel of transmission, a receiver, and a destination. Later revisions of this model included a source, an encoder, a message, a channel, a decoder, and a receiver.
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How did Lasswell use psychology to better understand politics?
Harold Lasswell employed psychology to explore the underlying motivations and behaviors within the political sphere. His work, including Psychopathology and Politics (1930), examined how the desire for power could be channeled constructively. Lasswell aimed to reorient social and biological sciences toward a science of social policy that would serve the democratic will for justice.
His studies in political psychology, such as World Politics and Personal Insecurity (1935) and Power and Personality (1948), investigated how power seekers sublimate personal frustrations through political means. Lasswell's approach helped expand the scope of political science by applying psychological insights to understand power dynamics and individual behavior in politics.
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How have Lasswell's ideas influenced modern political science and communication studies?
Harold Lasswell, a highly influential political scientist, significantly shaped the fields of political science and communication studies. Lasswell defined political science as the study of how value patterns change in society, with power dynamics as the central point of analysis. His key contribution is the question, "Who says what to whom with what effect?" which has guided communication theory.
Lasswell's exploration of propaganda techniques during World War I, along with his studies of communication and power, have evolved into modern research. His work incorporates systems theory, functional and role analysis, and content analysis. Lasswell's theories underpin the study of communication and political behavior.
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Harold Lasswell (born February 13, 1902, Donnellson, Illinois, U.S.—died December 18, 1978, New York, New York) was an influential political scientist known for seminal studies of power relations and of personality and politics and for other major contributions to contemporary behavioral political science. He authored more than 30 books and 250 scholarly articles on diverse subjects, including international relations, psychoanalysis, and legal education.
Lasswell received his bachelor’s degree in philosophy and economics in 1922 and his Ph.D. in 1926 from the University of Chicago, and he studied at the Universities of London, Geneva, Paris, and Berlin during several summers in the 1920s. He taught political science at the University of Chicago (1922–38) and then served at the Washington School of Psychiatry (1938–39) and was director of war communications research at the U.S. Library of Congress (1939–45). After World War II, he went to Yale University, where he served until the 1970s in various capacities, including as professor of law, professor of political science, and Ford Foundation Professor of Law and Social Sciences and emeritus fellow of Bramford College. He was also a professor of law at John Jay College of the City University of New York and at Temple University. He was a visiting lecturer at campuses throughout the world and was a consultant to numerous U.S. government agencies.
Lasswell viewed political science as the study of changes in the distribution of value patterns in society, and, because distribution depends on power, the focal point of his analysis was power dynamics. He defined values as desired goals and power as the ability to participate in decisions, and he conceived political power as the ability to produce intended effects on other people. In Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (1936)—a work whose title later served as the standard lay definition of politics—he viewed the elite as the primary holders of power, but in Power and Society: A Framework for Political Inquiry (1950), written with Abraham Kaplan, the discussion was broadened to include a general framework for political inquiry that examined key analytic categories such as person, personality, group, and culture.
His works on political psychology include Psychopathology and Politics (1930), which seeks the means of channeling the desire for domination to healthy ends; World Politics and Personal Insecurity (1935); and Power and Personality (1948), which deals with the problem of power seekers who sublimate their personal frustrations in power. In these and later works, Lasswell moved toward a moralistic posture, calling for the social and biological sciences to reorient themselves toward a science of social policy that would serve the democratic will for justice. Other features of political science that can be traced to Lasswell include systems theory, functional and role analysis, and content analysis.
Some of his other major works include Propaganda Technique in the World War (1927), World Revolutionary Propaganda (with Dorothy Blumenstock, 1939), Politics Faces Economics (1946), The Policy Sciences: Recent Developments in Scope and Method (with Daniel Lerner, 1951), and The Future of Political Science (1963).