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Harold D. Lasswell and the Social Study of Personal Insecurity

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Book cover Progressivism and US Foreign Policy between the World Wars

Part of the book series: The Palgrave Macmillan History of International Thought ((PMHIT))

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Abstract

The productivity of the American political scientist Harold D. Lasswell (1902–1978) was legendary. He has written, co-authored, edited, and co-edited about 60 books. He has also contributed to more than 300 articles on a diverse range of subjects and has written several hundred reviews and comments to a variety of different academic journals. In total, his scholarly writing, which spanned over some five decades, resulted in no less than four million published words. Already in his 20s, Lasswell planned and carried out an “interdisciplinary” research program that emphasized the significance of culture, social structures, and personality in order to understand various political phenomena. In a discipline, at the time still dominated by historical, legal, and philosophical methods, he was an innovator, who developed various methodologies during the course of his work, qualitative as well as quantitative ones, including traditional and non-experimental methods, such as content analysis and in-depth interviews, but also different experimental and clinical methods as well as various statistical techniques.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For a detailed critique of Lasswell’s Freudian approach to politics, see, for example, Horowitz (1962 ). In this essay, Horwitz characterizes Lasswell as a propagandist for “social control through science ”. Put somewhat differently, as an early advocate of what today constitutes a “bio-political” approach to the social scien ces.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Law, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Mikael Baaz

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  1. Mikael Baaz
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Social Sciences, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom

    Molly Cochran

  2. University of Buckingham, Buckingham, Buckinghamshire, United Kingdom

    Cornelia Navari

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Baaz, M. (2017). Harold D. Lasswell and the Social Study of Personal Insecurity. In: Cochran, M., Navari, C. (eds) Progressivism and US Foreign Policy between the World Wars. The Palgrave Macmillan History of International Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58432-8_9

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