Harold Lasswell

Harold Dwight Lasswell (February 13, 1902 – December 18, 1978) was a leading American political scientist and communications theorist. He was a PhD student at the University of Chicago, and he was a professor of law at Yale University. He served as president both of the American Political Science Association (APSA) and of the World Academy of Art and Science (WAAS).

According to a biographical memorial written by Gabriel Almond at the time of Lasswell's death and published by the National Academies of Sciences in 1987, Lasswell "ranked among the half dozen creative innovators in the social sciences in the twentieth century." At the time, Almond asserted that "few would question that he was the most original and productive political scientist of his time." Areas of research in which Lasswell worked included the importance of personality, social structure, and culture in the explanation of political phenomena. He was noted to be ahead of his time in employing a variety of methodological approaches that later became standards across a variety of intellectual traditions, including interviewing techniques, content analysis, para-experimental techniques, and statistical measurement.

Harold Lasswell, a political scientist by training, was a multidisciplinary academic. He could not pigeonhole his work into a single discipline, but instead celebrated the multi-faceted nature of his products. Lasswell was well associated with the disciplines of political science, psychology, and sociology – however he did not adhere to the distinction between these boundaries but instead erased the lines drawn to divide these disciplines.

Lasswell is well known for his model of communication, which focuses on "Who (says) What (to) Whom (in) What Channel (with) What Effect".

He is also known for his book on aberrant psychological attributes of leaders in politics and business, Psychopathology and Politics, as well as for another book on politics, Politics: Who Gets What, When, and How.

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