Harold D. Lasswell - Power and Society

POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY

In 18 Volumes

by
HAROLD D. LASSWELL
and
ABRAHAM KAPLAN

First published in 1952
by Routledge

Reprinted in 1998, 1999, 2000
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Transferred to Digital Printing 2007

1952 Harold D. Lasswell and Abraham Kaplan

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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This has not been possible in every case, however, and we would welcome correspondence from those individuals/companies we have been unable to trace.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Power and Society
ISBN 0-415-17556-9
Political Sociology: 18 Volumes
ISBN 0-415-17820-7
The International Library of Sociology: 274 Volumes
ISBN 0-415-17838-X

Publisher's Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent

A BRIEF BIOGRAPHY of this collaboration between a political scientist and a philosopher may be of interest to anyone concerned with increasing the amount of inter-disciplinary teamwork. The present book is a by-product of the Research Project on Wartime Communication which was organized within the framework of the Library of Congress shortly before World War II on the basis of a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. The Library project had several responsibilities: to perfect tools of research on mass communication; to recruit and train personnel for service in the agencies of propaganda, information, and intelligence; to advise on matters of strategy, tactics, and organization; to describe and analyze certain phases of the history of the war crisis.

As a guide to research and analysis, it was necessary to review the then current state of knowledge of political communication, particularly of war communication. A review of this kind must obviously be conducted with full regard to the theories, procedures, and findings of the disciplines concerned with the institutions of power and the process of communication. Such a review was handicapped by the relatively unsystematic and fragmentary nature of the literature in all pertinent fields. The situation prevailing at the time was part of the cost of the extraordinarily rapid expansion of empirical research, which had experienced an epoch of unparalleled richness in inventing and applying new methods of observing and processing data. The methods used in the empirical revolution covered a wide range of intensive and extensive procedures: for example, the prolonged psychoanalytic interview; the solicitation of life histories; participant observation of the life of a community; tests of aptitude, attitude, and attainment; brief polling interviews.

The research review was designed to give prominence to propositions amenable to further investigation. The degree of vagueness and ambiguity of the terms usually employed in the field required a considerable exercise in definition. And the orientation toward the ongoing of political inquiry demanded sufficient logical analysis to guarantee empirical significance in the propositions formulated. Hence the desirability of collaboration between a subject-matter specialist and a student of the philosophy of language and of scientific methodology. Teamwork was made easier because the role of symbols was central to both interests, the political scientist having been occupied with the theory of propaganda for many years and the philosopher having worked in the theory of signs and semantics with Charles Morris, Rudolph Carnap, and Bertrand Russell at the University of Chicago.

The manuscript was finished by the end of 1945, when Mr. Kaplan joined the Department of Philosophy at the University of California at Los Angeles, and Mr. Lasswell became a professor at the Yale Law School. In the past five years there have been many changes, both in the state of research in the field and in our own thinking about these problems. But the task of developing a framework for inquiry contemporaneous with the state of research is an unending one. Practical considerations have made it seem preferable to offer the material in its present form rather than attempt once more to reformulate it in accord with our continuing changes in viewpoint on this or that detail.

The text has been read in connection with seminars, especially at Yale, where it has been preliminary to more detailed study of certain legal problems; It is feasible to name but a few of our helpful critics, some of whose constructive points can be taken advantage of only in future work. At the formative stage we were particularly aware of the valuable aid of Nathan Leites, now of the RAND Corporation, and of Joseph M. Goldsen, research director of the project at the Library of Congress, now likewise of RAND. At Yale we name especially Professors William T. R. Fox (now of Columbia) and Myres S. McDougal. Dr. Harald Ofstad of the University of Oslo did a particularly thorough commentary during his stay in this country. As the references show, the published work of several recent and contemporary scholars has been most useful. In the United States we can name Charles E. Merriam, Robert M. Maclver, W. W. Willoughby, Carl J. Friedrich; in Great Britain, Harold J. Laski, George E. G. Catlin, Richard H. Tawney, and James Bryce; in Western Europe, Robert Michels, Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, and J. K. Bluntschli.