HAROLD DWIGHT LASSWELL

H A R O L D D W I G H T LASSWELL

1902-1978

Ford Foundation Professor Emeritus of Law

and the Social Sciences, Yale University

In Commemoration and Continuing Commitment

Yale Law School

Policy Sciences Center

The Ogden Foundation

HAROLD DWIGHT LASSWELL

This book is dedicated

to the memory of

HAROLD DWIGHT LASSWELL,

who died in New York City

on December 18, 1978

Memorial services were held in New York City

at the New York Academy of Sciences, on December 21, 1978,

and in New Haven, at the Yale Law School Auditorium,

on April 7, 1979.

This volume brings together statements made on

both these occasions and other memorial items.

C O N T E N T S

STATEMENTS MADE AT OR PREPARED FOR MEMORIAL SERVICE IN NEW HAVEN, AT

THE YALE LAW SCHOOL AUDITORIUM, ON APRIL 7, 1979

Myres S. McDougal/3 Luis Kutner/7

Robert E. Lane/9 Michael Reisman/13

Garry D. Brewer and Ronald D. Brunner/22 Bruce Lannes Smith/33 Mary Ellen Caldwell/44

Richard Snyder/50 Lawrence Zelic Freedman, M.D./54

William Ascher/59 Merritt B. Fox/66 H. Peter Stern/69

Arnold A. Rogow/72 Daniel Lerner/75

Joseph M. Goldsen/78

STATEMENTS MADE AT SERVICE IN NEW YORK CITY, AT THE NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES, ON

DECEMBER 21, 1978, AND OTHER MEMORIAL ITEMS

Stanley Renshon/84

Heinz Eulau/87 Myres S. McDougal/98

Alfred deGrazia/107

STATEMENTS MADE AT OR PREPARED FOR

MEMORIAL SERVICE IN NEW HAVEN, AT

THE YALE LAW SCHOOL AUDITORIUM,

ON APRIL 7, 1979.

M Y R E S S. M c D O U G A L *

We are meeting today both in remembrance and in renewed commitment. The sadness we feel is tempered in some measure by our memory of the past and by our hope for the future.

Harold did not want a formal ceremony. Some years ago he made notes for me in his own hand in which he said: "I desire no funeral services of any kind whatsoever. If after a suitable interval friends desire to arrange a memorial gather­ing, this, of course, would be welcomed."

It is in this spirit that we have arranged this meeting. The number of people who, in terms of their affection and friendship for Harold, their dedication to the same values that Harold held, and their contribution to public life and common interest, might have expected to have been invited to speak today is almost legion. I do not believe there was another human being of his generation who had more dedi­cated, influential, and articulate friends. Those of us who arranged this occasion thought in the beginning that we would simply have a symposium on the main fields of Harold's interest and later publish a learned booklet. We found that we were overwhelmed with people who were not only capable, but quite willing, to speak. Happily, every per­son to whom we issued an invitation accepted.

The letters, the telephone calls, the cables, the telegrams that have come in from people who couldn't be here are, again, almost countless. They fill a small room upstairs. They come from all over the country and from all over the

•Sterling Professor of Law, Emeritus, Yale Law School, New Haven, Conn.

3

world. I can't begin to indicate all of them to you but, as my part of the proceedings, I'd like to make reference to just a few of these.

The first is a letter from Professor Walter Isard, the pres­ident of the World Academy of Art and Science. Professor Isard asked me to represent that body at this meeting and to express their very deep sense of loss of their esteemed former president. The letter concludes, "His was a truly great mind, his was a truly great spirit." A large number of communications refer to Harold as a "unique and gentle man". Letter after letter uses the same two adjectives.

The second letter is from Professor Richard Falk: "Harold's death came as a real shock, and he leaves behind both an irreplaceable legacy of achievement and influence and a gap that no one else could ever hope to close."

The next is from Frederick L. Schuman, who was a col­league of Harold's in the early days at Chicago: "Harold Lasswell was an incisive thinker, an exciting teacher, a tal­ented writer and a dedicated disciple of enl ightenment. . . I join all who knew him or his work in mourning his passing and expressing profound gratitude for his invaluable contri­butions to the amelioration of the human condition."

Jack Jefferies: "Harold believed in and fought continu­ously for the enhancement of human dignity for all—for every individual on this earth. He will not die in­tellectually—he will, in fact, be immortal in the sense that, and to the extent that, his words and thoughts are written and spoken throughout the world."

Karl Carstens, the president of the German Parliament: "He was a great scholar and a great teacher. I attended his seminar some thirty years ago and have, ever since, drawn great benefit from that experience. I am sure that many of

4

his former colleagues and students all over the world feel deep sorrow about his death as I do, myself."

Shigeru Oda, a judge of the International Court of Justice: "It was with great sadness that I learned of the death a few months ago of my old professor and mentor. I wish to convey my deepest condolences on the loss of a highly es­teemed member of our profession."

Venkata Raman: "For all of us, privileged to be close and to share Harold's affection and intellectual inspiration, his demise will remain more than a personal loss. His endearing smile and warm greeting will be remembered by the several hundreds of foreign scholars and students welcomed into his offices and classrooms."

Walter Weyrauch: "In many ways, he was too good for this world and, rather than a flaw, this was the basis of his distinction. People recognized the generosity of his mind, even if they did not agree with him. Thus they gave him the place he so clearly deserved. Perhaps this is a strange way of recognizing his intellectual achievements but, to me, he was essentially an affectionate person. His whole theory of values did have an overwhelming concern with humanity."

The last is from Professor Heinz Eulau: "One of the admirable things about Lasswell's teaching is that it makes discipleship impossible. He was always looking into the future and the next project. This is why his going is such a loss. He is an immortal and I think he knew it. The universe, past, present, and future was his oyster."

The first speaker I would like to introduce is Mr. Luis Kutner, Harold's executor. Luis was a student in the first class that Harold taught and has been his warm friend, and guardian in measure, ever since. In the notes made to give instructions about a possible occasion of this kind, this is

5

what Harold wrote. He said, "Let me state categorically that the friend who has been of the greatest practical assistance over the years is my former student, Luis Kutner. He has relieved me of innumerable burdens and made it possible to concentrate upon the research, teaching and advisory and writing activities in which I have been engaged."

We all owe Mr. Kutner a debt of thanks.

6

L U I S K U T N E R *

The time was 1924 and there he sat with his luminous eyes, his cropped hair. He looked down at me and said, "What are you doing in my class? This is a graduate class."

I said, "Well, I had a free hour, didn't know whom to pick; I took a pin and put it in the program and up you came." That's how we began our friendship.

It was more than a friendship. We had a ligament of rapport without speaking. And through the years—when he was away for some time, we didn't communicate—he would often say, "The reason why I didn't write to you or call you was because I knew you were there." And that, I think, epitomizes our friendship. He did not like the mundane, detestable chores of living. I saw that immediately.

I recall the days Harold was doing his Psychopathology and Politics. Around that same time, he launched the social psychiatry technique for the Eucharistic Congress of '26 in Chicago. There was a tremendous wave of anti-Catholic ten­sion. At that time, Eugenio Pacelli was nuncio and we all had to ad-lib the idea of what we were doing. I must confess, I knew very little at that time of what Harold was doing, but he said, "We'll do it," and we did it. We did minimize the hostilities; we did try to diminish the tension, and I think we did a reasonably good job. In 1950, when I was in the Minds-zenty case, and I had a chance to meet with the Holy Father, he remembered that chap from Chicago and quite clearly asked about Harold.

'Attorney, Chicago, Illinois.

7

Harold is a person whom we will all remember for all time. We won't forget him, not because of his voluminous writings, nor because of his tremendous impact on many, many persons, but because—I would say—of his effusion of generosity and warmth at all times. He was never despond­ent. He agonized but never displayed his agony.

So he was, during the times I remember, on many, many, many occasions, and, particularly, when I ran for Congress at his insistence. "You run, you may lose," he said "but they get to know who you are." I ran for Congress in 1936. Harold designed the billboards, giving me my slogan which was "Tolerance, Abundance, Security and Peace." I did not win but it was a good campaign. And I loved him then, I love him now, and I will always love him.

8

R O B E R T E. L A N E *

"The aim alone is constant;" said Harold, "we are con­cerned with the progressive democratization of mankind. The task is to search for every conceivable means in every available situation."1 He commenced that search in an odd corner with a work on Chicago municipal government, pub­lished in 1923, followed the next year by a study of the Public Service Commissions. An inauspicious beginning for a world scholar, a curious entry into the pastures that invited him in his later years. But the next year he was launched into political psychology, and the year after that into the study of propaganda, two fields that he would illuminate in his life work. He would more than illuminate them; he would define them as fields, bringing them out of the cacophony of back­ground noises and give them voice and articulation.

Propaganda was but a part of Harold's interest in com­munication, language and semantics, symbols and style. His Propaganda Techniques in the World War, published in 1927, had a voice of its own, however, which was heard by many, including Foster R. Dulles who said of it, "It is a telling indictment of all war and the hypocrisy and deceit which come in its train: in its suggestions for the future it is a Machiavellian textbook which should promptly be de­stroyed."2 Dulles may have changed his mind when Harold went to Washington during World War II to help the gov-

*Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Professor, Institution for Social and Policy Studies, Yale University.

1 Power and Personality (New York: Norton, 1948), p. 221. 2 Dwaine Marvick, ed., Harold D. Lasswell on Political Sociology (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1977), p. 49.

9

ernment analyze German propaganda. In that capacity he invented "content analysis" for the purpose of identifying underlying themes in German strategy and thought and also for showing the similarity of American pro-Nazi publica­tions and the German official line.

Words were congenial to Harold; he not only counted them but he understood their latent meanings, their import and contexts. He used them well—and frequently. In his lifetime he published nearly four million of them. But he understood them as an earlier political scientist, Thomas Hobbes, understood them. Hobbes said: "For words are wise men's counters—they do but reckon with them; but they are the money of fools."3 Little did Hobbes know that wise men would not only use them for counters, but count them to discover patterns and messages that the words themselves concealed.

Harold was contemptuous of surfaces and appearances, linear thinking and single dimensions. He never met "one dimensional man." It was this interest in the complexity of human nature that led him to become interested in psycho­analysis, that tortured version of humanity which invites compassion for the human vessel within which the raging id and the punitive superego punish the poor, conscious self. With subtlety and delicacy and that concern for human dig­nity that always marked his work he developed a theory of Psychopathology and Politics (1930) which left an enduring impression on political science. Many of us who read that book were marked for life, and when it was followed five years later with World Politics and Personal Insecurity (1935), the dimensions and textures of politics were changed forever. Last year the International Society of Polit-

' Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan (New York: E. P. Dutton, n.d.), p. 16.

10

ical Psychology was formed, with Harold as Honorary Pres­ident. Like Harold, the Society is ecumenical, embracing the warring sects of social psychologists and psychoanalysts, so­ciologists, anthropologists and political scientists—held to­gether by the image of a man who knew no sects, and never-recognized disciplinary boundaries. "Personalities fit to par­ticipate in the democratization of society," he wrote, "must love themselves enough to love all."4 By these criteria the members of the Society are fully qualified to engage in the democratization of society.

It was characteristic of Harold that his book on The Anal­ysis of Political Behaviour: An Empirical Analysis (1948) which gave momentum to what has been a dominant mode of political analysis, should have been published in England, where the idea of studying political behavior, as contrasted to political ideas, has been greeted by stony resistance. He met the enemy, but they were not his—not yet. Elsewhere in the world the empirical analysis of political behavior has thrived; in true paradigmatic fashion it has not converted its enemies but it has won the affection of what was once the younger generation and has now become an elite.

Harold studied elites, quantitatively, with penetration and without mercy. In 1952, with Daniel Lerner, he published his The Comparative Study of Elites which was quickly fol­lowed by a host of other elite studies—among them studies of American governors and East European leaders. There was no room for a great man theory of history in Harold's contextual analysis; elites were part of the great play of social forces, and at the same time vulnerable to internal conflicts. As judges, they were victims of their personal pasts; as members of the politburos they were subject to the

Power and Personality, p. 221.

11

divisive forces of social classes and revolutionary move­ments. The rational and the irrational were part of the whole that Harold examined.

"Mind is the great lever of all things," said another politi­cal scientist, Daniel Webster as he laid the corner stone of the Bunker Hill monument; "human thought is the process by which human ends are ultimately answered" (1825). But Harold knew that levers need energy to move, and the energy was in human passion, the irrational and chaotic force which did not detract from but contributed to the dignity of man. For it was in looking at the wholeness of things that Harold found his pleasure—an endless pleasure that stayed with him for all of his fruitful life.

The light that Harold shed is of a curious character for it does not use up energy but generates it. Many in my genera­tion know the source of the light that illuminates their work; younger scholars may not be aware whence comes the bright light that makes their work more precise, more im­aginative, incandescent from a remote generator. His was a dazzling light, but, as he and his co-workers at the Yale Law School said, "If the light cannot be dazzling, there is no reason for sulking in the dark.''^ Harold has entered into his dark night alone, but the light of his work will long illumi­nate the pages of those he left behind.

Myres S. McDougal, Harold D. Lasswell, and James C. Miller, The Interpreta­

tion of Agreements and World Public Order: Principles of Content and Procedure

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), p. xviii.

12

MICHAEL REISMAN*

In World Politics and Personal Insecurity, Harold Lass-well's manifesto of an internationale of scholars, he derided the ivory towerists, engaged in "a compulsive neurotic ritual of collecting, ordering, condensing, and expelling data", and "aside from modest incomes and great deference from other compulsive personality types" and "oral erotics", ignoring "the political implications". Harold refused to ignore the power consequences of scholarship: "The act of emitting vocabulary in public places, like a university, creates a pat­tern which diffuses with greater or lesser rapidity along the channels of communication." And with a characteristic ir­ony, he took responsibility and gave direction to those politi­cal implications: "The hope of the professors of social science, if not of the world, lies in the competitive strength of an elite based on vocabulary, footnotes, questionnaires and conditioned responses, against an elite based on vocabu­lary, poison gas, property, and family prestige." The lawyer is a unique blend of scholar and activist, of contemplation and manipulation, to use Harold's words. With Harold's program, it was hardly surprising that he saw in us a subject for inquiry and for education, and that he chose to settle at the Yale Law School to pursue his enterprise on authority.

Harold was, par excellence, the expert on power, but he hardly underestimated authority. He remarked of his fortui­tous meeting with Myres McDougal that he needed "an associate . . . who could overcome the difficulties in delimit-

* Professor of Law, Yale Law School.

13

ing the 'authority' component of the power process." With control and authority one could understand and influence, Harold's tactical objectives. In Power and Personality he wrote, " . . . the inquiry is not an end in itself. We have a sociopolitical objective, the more perfect instrumentation of democratic values . . . to put what we have learned in the service of human dignity." He was interested in developing a theory which could both increase understanding of how power was used institutionally to secure the shaping and sharing of all other values and to increase the skill of those wishing to use power to create a world public order of hu­man dignity. Happily, he found the collaborator who shared those goals and had the complementary skills in an abun­dance and quality to match his own. Together they forged a jurisprudence for the contemporary decision specialist, committed to a public order of human dignity.

The lawyer, Harold taught, is a specialist in making choices, in creating choice-making institutions for his com­munities and in making those institutions produce wise and effective choices at the right times. Any praxis of choice-making, Harold insisted, must include (i) a notion of the self, observing and acting, (ii) the accuracy and relevance of the way that self looks at things as well as (iii) the accuracy and relevance of the things it selects to look at and, with all of this information, (iv) some systematic way of making choices. If the specialist is intellectually responsible, he will want this praxis to be rational and efficient. If the specialist is responsible and moral, he will be certain to test the con­tent of his alternative choices and the aggregate effects they are likely to precipitate against clearly expressed social goals. Harold's systematic exposition of these ideas comprised his jurisprudence.

Harold's focus from his earliest work was on human be-

14

ings, understood in all their complexity, making choices through time—people, institutions and values. His jurispru­dence built on this schema and applied it prescriptively—as a method for locating the self in the comprehensive flow of events, clarifying goals, refining foci, articulating maps of social process and developing a sequence of choice making— "the intellectual tasks of decision"—which would yield op­timum rationality.

First, there was the question of observational standpoint and scrutiny of the self. Perhaps more obviously in law than in other disciplines, the individual is the ultimate instrument of observation, evaluation and choice as well as the ultimate target of decision. Harold admonished the scholar and decision-maker to examine his self-system scrupulously. As an early member of the psychoanalytic movement, Harold had fought for the utility and legitimacy of this method of inquiry, and he applied it to this decision context with ex­traordinary effect. Yet it was hardly a slavish adoption. Harold was in favor of what he called the "sociologizing" of Freud, and he used that master's work creatively and innova-tively. But he was no popularizer or simplifier, and his was hardly an easy method. In an Afterword to Psychopathology

and Politics some 30 years after its first appearance, Harold wrote coolly but movingly of the moral and emotional prob­lems his research method presented and, in particular, the stirring of imperfectly resolved neuroses and anxieties in the researcher himself. It may be the only time that Harold shared an anguish, and even that was characteristically dignified and considerate of his readers, not a complaint, but a caveat to those who followed.

Then there was the question of focus, of how to look at things, which lenses to fit into the instruments of observa­tion. With Myres McDougal, he insisted that scholarly em-

15

phasis be balanced between perspectives and operations, what people said and thought and what they actually did. And of course, he adapted and invented methods for doing both in ways more profound than before. Behavior, whether individual or mass, became subject to refined indicators for measuring or charting over time. Words were analyzed for both latent and manifest content and thought patterns sub­jected to Harold's distinctive methods of psychoanalysis.

A special part of Harold's brilliance was his simultaneous appreciation of effective power and of authority, of deeds and symbols, his capacity to study each separately but to integrate them in political analysis. The distinction is drawn clearly in Harold's Politics and thereafter is a fundamental strut of his thought. With McDougal, Harold insisted that both authority and control be studied and that the word "law" be reserved for processes of decision that were both authoritative and controlling. This single insight may prove to be one of the most important legacies of the New Haven school, for its discipline prevents the scholar from slipping into the fantasy worlds of semantic law or of naked power.

Some decisions are essentially about decision-making it­self, about the establishment and maintenance of the indis­pensable institutions for making decisions. In a documentary sense, this is the Constitution, frequently assumed to be a sacred talisman to be construed as holy writ, in accord with the assumed intentions of the drafters. The futility of this approach is obvious to the historian; "all history", Croce said, "is contemporary". In the same sense, all constitutions are contemporary. To look at it otherwise is to sterilize contemporaneous democracy. Harold and his collaborators insisted that the focus be redirected to the process of deci­sion, the constitutive process, a reorganization of focus as radical as Copernicus'.

16

In World Politics, Harold wrote "Whatever is relevant to significant change is relevant to the configurative analysis of politics." Harold's field included all value processes, and his concern was the shaping and sharing of values to create his commonwealth of human dignity. This conception, perforce, took him far beyond the traditional study of political science—respectful contemplation of the apparatus of the state. But there never was any tendency toward a type of intellectual totalitarianism. To the contrary. Harold distin­guished between a public order, where norms were sustained by comparatively intense sanctions, and a civic order, where norms were maintained by comparatively mild sanctions. His preference was for as broad a civic order as possible, an inclination manifest in his brilliant work on sanctioning theory and on human rights. His concern for the autonomy of the individual was such that we sometimes called him an anarchist.

Harold was as concerned with the object of his focus as with the focus components. His "cognitive map" of phase analysis of relevant processes, his sequential analysis of deci­sion functions and his value analysis, were integrated into a comprehensive and dynamic flow of social, community, power and authoritative processes at any level of organiza­tion. They comprise an intellectual tour de force of bound­less learning and imaginative integration, transformed into a powerful tool for analysis and decision-making. But they would have remained static, contemplative, without a praxis of choice-making. For this Harold conceived the five intel­lectual tasks of the decision-specialist, the executive branch of the Lasswell-McDougal enterprise and a major legacy for lawyers and policy scientists. Briefly, Harold saw rational purposive choice-making as comprised of five sequential op­erations: goal clarification, trend study, factor analysis, future

17

projections and the invention of alternatives. He sought to clarify policy and method for each of these tasks in order to increase the rationality and efficiency of decision.

Harold saw law and politics as purposive activities; the content of purpose became a preeminent consideration. With his conception of a manifold and integrated reality, Harold insisted that goals be specified, not for a single key variable, but for all values in his preferred public order of human dignity, for all phases of the constitutive process on through to the preferred psychopersonal organization of the self. Goal clarification became coterminous with the very limits of the earth-space arena. Goals were to be specified for each value and each phase and to be interrelated; the method was postulation rather than derivation. A moral decision was to be the conformity of effects to goals and not justifica­tions to principle. Once postulated, goals became susceptible to empirical testing for trends toward or away from their approximation, for the identification of conditioning factors affecting the trends, for projection of alternative future flows tested for their degree of conformity to goal and to the invention of alternatives. Thus preference could be removed from a fantasy world and made into a powerful instrument of social intervention and appraisal, major public functions of the lawyer. Intervention into the lives of others is a se­rious responsibility and Harold's method made it more re­sponsible, for it permitted the lawyer to test alternatives for their aggregate consequences on all the interrelated and now specified and operational goals of public order.

Past trends in decision are studied to determine the extent to which particular goals have been achieved for the factors which conditioned them and as springboards for extrapola­tion and invention. If past decisions are given a normative or even sacramental force in a goal-oriented context, there is

18

often a temptation, at some level of consciousness, to fa­shion a trend to support a goal. "The falseness of an opin­ion," wrote Nietzsche, "is not for us any objection to i t . . . The question is how far it is life-furthering, life-preserving, species preserving, perhaps species-creating." But Harold never put himself beyond good and evil. His realism, honesty and respect for the truth made his trend studies meticulous; he never hesitated to report negative or contra­dictory trends.

Harold's demand for accuracy in understanding decision trends outstripped extant methodology. He reached into other disciplines and adapted and invented: propaganda and then content analysis, the adaptation of psychoanalytical methods to political science, the use of indicators and so on. He had no patience for the neo-scholastic fascination with a method and the cultivation of virtuosity in it for its own sake. Method was a means. The test of the quality of the tool and the skill of the hand of the craftsman wielding it was its product. Did it contribute to a detailed and contextual de­scription of the past trend of decision?

Harold had a special interest in the environment of condi­tions in which decisions were made. Traditionally, the lawyer's artifacted conception of a past decision was a judg­ment, abstracted from context. Other than as a talisman, that conception offered little utility to Harold. Trends in past decision were useful to the projection of future possibil­ities and the invention of alternatives only if the factors which conditioned those decisions could be identified. Harold's contextual theory permitted him to avoid the ster­ile debate on "causality" and to reconstruct the complex of environmental and predispositional factors which had in­fluenced past decisions.

Obviously, the decision specialist bent on influencing

19

trends in social process must develop some idea of what the future holds if he mounts no intervention. Other scholars apparently assumed that there was such a thing as "the future", inchoate, in the wings, down the line, and they actually sought to prophesy this thing that would be. While Harold was interested in techniques for extrapolating past trends, his conception and methodology of the intellectual task of projection of future trends were radically different. Harold invented the method of developmental constructs, the conscious invention of a spectrum of futures, ranging from the most desirable future, approximating the goal values of human dignity, to the least desirable future. These possible futures were projected, providing artificial touch points against which the sonar of the decision-maker could be beamed, as he moved through a continuous present, pro­viding indications of the degree of success of particular strategies for achieving or avoiding particular futures and signals of when to change strategies to increase approxima­tion to goals. Harold's constructs were designed as tools, but many may have become important literary legacies of our culture. His construct of a public order of human dignity is at once a realistic and luminous vision of what the city of man can be. His construct of the garrison state has served as a frightening reminder of the culmination of certain tenden­cies in this century.

An indispensable task of the decision specialist is the invention of alternatives that might lead to a greater ap­proximation to preferred goals. Harold's creativity was daz­zling, and those of us who are lawyers gained valuable prac­tical advice. Harold was as unimpressed with these virtuoso performances as we were impressed. He had a secular con­ception of creativity; it was, as he said, extending your own

20

and others' cognitive maps. He was interested in systematic techniques for developing and increasing creativity.

Harold's work on standpoint, focus, and appropriately contextual map and his brilliant rendition of the five intel­lectual tasks made him the decision specialist of the century. But consideration only of Harold's awesome and monumen­tal work can overshadow Harold, the person. Harold was a superior man, fine and refined in taste, in humor and in bearing. He was always gracious and considerate of others, in his success and in his final trial. He was a great man in every way.

To have studied with Harold was a privilege; to work with him and be his friend was that and more; it was an honor, an invitation to continued learning and personal growth, to a stream of intellectual riches dispensed with generosity, and an opportunity to participate in work that was moral in the highest sense of that word.

21

GARRY D. BREWER* AND RONALD D. BRUNNER**

INTRODUCTION On September 6, 1956, Harold D. Lasswell delivered his

presidential address to the American Political Science Asso­ciation.1 It was a startling event. Not only did it mark Lass-well's reentry into the discipline after a nearly fifteen-year hiatus during which time he had concentrated his attentions on psychology, psychiatry, and public service, but it served notice on the profession that time was rapidly running out for responsible and creative thought to be brought to bear on a number of urgent issues. As always, the exercise was purposeful; it was nothing less than an inquiry "into the possible reconciliation of man's mastery over Nature with freedom, the overriding goal of policy in our body politic."2

In the first three parts of the address, Lasswell reviewed past and impending scientific developments in armaments, production, and evolution, and the challenges they presented to political science. The concluding section, "Our Future Program," states and elaborates "the modest proposal that it is appropriate for political scientists, in company with other scientists and scholars dealing with human affairs, to im-

•Professor, School of Organization and Management and Political Science and

Institution for Social and Policy Studies, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.

"Professor of Political Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich.

Professors Brewer and Brunner addressed themselves to "Harold D. Lasswell

and Political Science". 1 "The Political Science of Science," American Political Science Review, Vol. 50

(December 1956), pp. 961-979. 2 Ibid., p. 961.

22

prove procedures of continuous deliberation upon the po­tential impacts of science and technology upon human affairs."3

How this was to be accomplished, and the urgency for doing so, are suggested in the full text of the address and exemplified in the prolific outpourings of this remarkable man. And while any recapitulation must necessarily do in­justice, if but one additional "recruit" to the demanding call­ing Harold proposed is encouraged to take his lead, then the task will have been worthwhile.

SEVERAL DOMINANT THEMES

The standpoint adopted and illustrated in the address had been earlier designated hominocentric politics and presented as consistent with the main currents of political thought, both past and present.4

As science, [hominocentric politics] finds its subject matter in interpersonal relations, not abstract institutions or organiza­tions; and it sees the person as a whole, in all his aspects, not as the embodiment of this or that limited set of needs or interests. As policy, it prizes not the glory of a depersonalized state or the efficiency of a social mechanism, but human dignity and the realization of human capacities.

Human dignity includes freedom, the sharing of power among the many rather then the few, as well as widespread participation in all other value processes. Our inheritance of normative propositions is adequate. Even though circum­stances change, the aims of a democratic society are perma­nent. The task is to specify and respecify them in concrete

'Ibid., p. 977.

Harold D. Lasswell and Abraham Kaplan, Power and Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), p. xxiv.

23

circumstances, so that whatever potential for progress exists can be realized. Political scientists presumably have roles and responsibilities in this task.5

"In the interest of concreteness," Lasswell notes at the onset, "I shall have something to say about past and poten­tial applications of science in three areas: armaments, pro­duction, and evolution."6 Such applications continue to have profound implications for freedom, and the analyses are astonishingly contemporary almost a quarter of a century later.7 Solar energy and other scientific applications were expected to increase and redistribute resources on a global scale. They were also expected to decentralize perspectives in which some decisions were to be made. Nuclear weapons and the disposal of nuclear wastes were perceived as threats to evolution. Biology and engineering were narrowing the obvious differences between man and other species and be­tween man and machine. These were expected to provoke crises in Western culture and to raise the possibility of "biologizing" or engineering class and caste differences. Per­haps the most shocking possibility would be contact with extraterrestial life forms. It would be "embarrassing, at least, to discover that we are the savages or that we are put together on a markedly inferior biological plan."8 The im­ages conjured up in this example were not frivolous, but were intended to call into question the broader issues of

'Haro ld D. Lasswell, A Pre-View of Policy Sciences (New York: Elsevier, 1971), pp. 40-44.

""The Political Science of Science," p. 961.

It is interesting to assess the reactions of today's students to this address: one

common reaction is incredulity that anyone could have correctly "guessed" so many

of the specific problems that now clamor for attention and resolution. The point is

that Harold's "guesses" were seldom, if ever, random or trivial, but, rather, they

were the product of a powerfully disciplined and marvelously creative intelligence. 8 "The Political Science of Science," p. 977.

24

what constituted freedom and the other overriding goals subsumed in the concept of human dignity.

Ever prescriptive, Lasswell concluded his address by indi­cating what political scientists could do; his consistently affirmative recommendation was, of course, the emerging conception of the policy sciences—an approach grounded in the principles of content and procedure that Lasswell developed, applied and left as his legacy to us all.9

A STATUS REPORT That the problems Harold described so brilliantly have

not been "solved" and that the full potential of the policy sciences movement and approach has not been realized con­cerned but did not discourage him. Always optimistic about the prospects for political science, a discipline for which he demonstrated preference, Lasswell nonetheless anticipated well many of the obstacles and challenges it and its adher­ents presented to his own efforts at reconfiguration and redirection,10

Any attempt to formulate such a method must be reconciled in advance to encounter a limited degree of prompt acceptance among the members of the knowledge community who concen­trate on government, law and politics. The blocking or delay may be ascribed to many factors. Professional training itself is a relatively conservative influence since it depends on a tacit and extensive agreement about basic philosophy, training, curricu­lum, and professional competence.

" The development of the approach (and profession) is traced in Harold D.

Lasswell, "The Emerging Conception of the Policy Sciences," Policy Sciences, Vol.

1, No. 1 (Spring 1970), pp. 3-14.

"The Configurative Method," in Karl W. Deutsch, ed., Methods of Political

Behavior Research: Handbook (New York: Macmillan, forthcoming). We were

honored to collaborate in this enterprise; however, this assessment is pure

Lasswell.

25

Specialization and fragmentation of attention and effort, as evidenced in the proliferation of subspecialty fields within political science, are not necessarily undesirable outcomes, but they do "not invariably result in the formation of profes­sionals who see the possible advantages of a configurative viewpoint,"11 Indeed, as appears to have been the case, specialization has created relatively transient successes that have in turn fostered a sense of complacency for some in the discipline. For others, many of whom are not yet well estab­lished, the discipline either appears to be in turmoil and lacking in focus or direction or to be uninteresting and preoccupied with esoterica. One need only pause momen­tarily to consider the stunning array of crises that challenge civilization to dismiss self-indulgence, in the first instance, or to spark excitement and commitment, in the latter.12

We are all aware of the many undesirable features of crisis decision-making—little or no time to formulate and assess alternatives, gross uncertainty about the likely outcomes flowing from the choices made, and inadequate opportuni­ties for consensual, democratic processes to operate. A crisis, in these terms, is testimony to the breakdown of the intellec­tual enterprise and a sobering indictment of those who be­lieve that their own specialized professional endeavors are "doing enough."

We are less aware of an emerging trend, particularly in the areas of high technology, where "crises" have all the appearances of having been manufactured intentionally or

1 ' Ibid. 12 Several other relevant factors are noted in Bernard Barber, "Resistance by

Scientists to Scientific Discovery," Science, Vol. 134 (1 September 1961), pp. 596-

602; the broad view is contained in Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific

Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970 edit.); and the concept

and status of professionalism are discussed in Gary D. Brewer, "Professionalism:

The Need for Standards," Interfaces, Vol. 4, No. 1 (November 1973), pp. 20-27.

26

allowed to evolve undisturbed because those in authority have failed to acquire more than a partial understanding of the contextual details within their compass of responsibility. If this appraisal is even partly accurate, then crisis avoidance becomes the highest priority task facing those favoring dem­ocratic processes and values. This task, "preventive politics" according to Lasswell, has been ill-attended by political scientists, whose sphere of responsibility certainly includes the creation and dissemination of intelligence to inform and improve policy and decisionmaking in many arenas and lev­els of responsibility.

Political philosophy, for example, has emphasized the ac­quisition of skill in the techniques of logical analysis, but this has diverted attention away from such critical issues as the clarification or choice of value goals. Specialists in political theology, metaphysical politics, and jurisprudence have tended to restrict themselves to analyzing systems of politi­cal justification—often without benefit of, reference to, or grounding in specific, concrete settings.13 Political history has been of slight interest save for an innovative few who have directed their attention to time-series problems and to systematic explanatory theories; and, in the absence of an accurate accumulation of experience, discredited, outmoded, and inappropriate policy prescriptions have been allowed to recur with cloying regularity.14 The specialists on explana-

Abraham Kaplan, American Ethics and Public Policy (New York: Oxford Press edit., 1963) is precisely on target here.

Karl W. Deutsch, "Towards an Inventory of Basic Trends and Patterns in

Comparative International Politics," American Political Science Review, Vol. 54

(March 1960), pp. 34-57, provides one convenient stock-taking and anchoring

point for those interested in this. "Deregulation," a policy fad of the year, has a long

and rich history; however, its fervent and uninformed embrace by power specialists

of many ideological persuasions ignores this fact.

21

tory models often give minimal attention to normative con­siderations,15 and this self-restriction appears to have ex­tended to those who concentrate on the forecasting of coming events, too.16 Those who focus on the invention and evaluation of policy options would seem to require a com­prehensive viewpoint, but it is all too common to see that current, short-range, and narrow preoccupations have ab­sorbed their attention.17

IS A CONFIGURATIVE APPROACH FEASIBLE? Innovations seldom begin without difficulty, resistance,

and a need for modification. Since at the beginning tech­niques are usually imperfect, negative criticism is common and easily directed at the innovation.18 In addition to the legitimate defects discovered by competent critics, the growth of new learning may be retarded on illegitimate grounds, such as bias against novelty, envy, and laziness.19

Having such realities in mind, one might be discouraged from trying to formulate any version of a configurative ap­proach. Lasswell, and those who value his intellectual inno­vation, do not see it this way but rather draw strength from

1 ' R a l p h Strauch, "A Critical Look at Quantitative Methodology," Policy Analy­

sis, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Winter 1976), pp. 121-144, provides the general argument; and

Garry D. Brewer, Politicians, Bureaucrats and the Consultant: A Critique of Urban

Problem Solving (New York: Basic Books, 1973), gives specific evidence.

William Ascher, Forecasting: An Appraisal for Policy-Makers and Planners (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1978), is a thorough and responsible work on this subject.

John Steinbruner, The Cybernetic Theory of Decision (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1974), makes many good general points on this topic; and Patrick

Larkey, Evaluating Public Programs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979),

is one notable empirical source.

Garry D. Brewer, "Innovation, Social Change and Reality," Technological

Forecasting and Social Change, Vol. 5, No. 1 (1973), pp. 343-365, develops this.

A general source here is H. G. Barnett, Innovation: The Basis for Cultural

Change (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1953).

28

the presumption that as many areas of knowledge evolve they generate a need for a deeper and broader approach.20

A more detailed answer to the feasibility question can be generated by reference to Lasswell's five intellectual tasks as applied to the needs of the political science profession.

With respect to goals: If political scientists were to accept the realization of human dignity as a long-term objective, then one ought not expect to be adversely criticized or se­verely penalized for his or her endeavors. Rejection of this purpose, for instance in the pursuit of a world community dominated by a self-perpetuating caste or interest group, carries far-reaching consequences for resource allocations in the pursuit of knowledge and in many other telling ways. The truthfulness of the allegation that American political scientists serve the specific values of a capitalistic-tech­nological-extroverted system is but one measure of the dis­tance the profession must progress to realize its full social potential and responsibility.21

With respect to trends: Partly as an expression of the lack of concern for explicit value goals, the data assets now at the disposal of the profession provide inadequate information about whether global, national, and subnational trends are moving toward or away from the realization of goal values relevant to the quality of human life.22

John E. Koehler, The Study, Analysis and Advice Industry (Santa Monica,

Calif.: The Rand Corporation, P-5433, May 1975). See also, Wade Green, "Econo­

mists in Recession," New York Times Magazine (May 12, 1972), pp. 18-19, 58-65.

The general charge is leveled in Harold Orlans, Contracting for Knowledge

(San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1973) in many passionate ways; supporting evidence is

presented for the national security "study industry" in Garry D. Brewer and Martin

Shubik, The War Game: A Critique of Military Problem Solving (Cambridge,

Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), Chap. 5.

The inrensive and subjective dimension of the matter, missing in virtually

every effort known to us to construct social indicators and social accounts, is treated

explicitly and thoroughly in Steven R. Brown, The Study of Political Subjectivity)

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980 forthcoming).

29

With respect to conditions: Value goals provide guide­lines for scientific research, a proposition that has been ex­emplified in the rising demand to protect and restore the environment. Much more is needed, especially with respect to the many political science and general science investiga­tions that make for policy success or failure in reference to space, air, climate, the weather, seabed, earthquakes, fossil and other energy, minerals and metals, marine life, food, forest and timber products, and special regions, e.g., polar, deserts, marshes and estuaries, rain forests.23

With respect to projections: Despite the fact that policy must necessarily be rooted in the future, the implications of this are only slightly understood. For instance, systematic procedures may be employed to show how simple extrapola­tions can be used to locate the time and place of emerging conflicts (or opportunities), and to formulate previews of likely resolutions.24 Continual scanning of projective maps results in the discovery and statement of emerging priori­ties, such as the currently rising emphasis on genetic engineering.

With respect to policy alternatives: The configurative ap­proach contributes many procedural and contextual aids to help improve the stimulation and consideration of policy alternatives in many settings. The "decision seminar," as one example, is.aimed at the mobilization and concentration of knowledge at the focus of expert and more popular atten­tion. The "social planetarium" proposes to draw on the ex­periences of astronomers in locating and representing enti-

Boris Pregel, Harold D. Lasswell, and John McHale, eds., World Priorities

(New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction, 1977).

William Ascher, Forecasting, Chaps. 1 & 2.

30

ties in space and time to serve comparable ends for communities and groups of varying sizes.25

While the feasibility of the configurative approach is in little doubt (indeed, its various attributes particularly favor it), we are far less sanguine about the political science pro­fession's willingness or ability to adopt this or a functional equivalent as a primary orienting and guiding source. None­theless, the magnitude of the challenges confronting- the profession and the urgency of the many tasks touched on and suggested in this brief essay both work to sustain opti­mism that progress can be made along many fronts.

A PREFERRED OUTCOME

Lasswell's configurative approach is an evolving instru­ment. It is not indispensable that every political scientist dedicate his or her entire career to learning and applying the approach; for many the challenges may exceed the intellec­tual reach. Nevertheless, it is desirable that enough adopt the approach to enable a stream of reliable information to be made available to all members of the profession. The train­ing of competent political science professionals must include an understanding of the inclusive map, together with a mas­tery of relevant procedures, and with capabilities for organ­izing skilled teams to execute common projects and programs.

These, and a host of related efforts, if realized, may in

For a clear statement of these procedural methods: Harold D. Lasswell, in Daniel Lerner, ed., The Human Meaning of the Social Sciences (New York: Meridian Books, 1959), pp. 89-113; for a compendium of experiences with the decision seminar: Garry D. Brewer and Ronald D. Brunner, eds., Political Devel­opment and Change: A Policy Approach (New York: The Free Press, 1975), Chap. 12.

31

time help answer the nagging "So What?" question posed in

1935 by Lasswell in the following provocative terms:26

Do we by lecturing and writing merely create others who lec­ture and write? Is there any evidence that those who talk or write in this vein will be marked by any homogeneity . . . ? Do they stand out from the rank and file of the community during times of stress, or do they adapt their idiosyncratic vocabulary to the exigencies of instant and overwhelming necessity? Does more knowledge of footnotes and vocabulary modify overt ad­justments? Is there anything that carries over from theme writ­ing, lecturing, listening, and discussing to paying, fighting, and other overt acts of life?

Harold's own conduct and accomplishments demonstrated the positive potential for the rest of us.

2 6 Harold D. Lasswell, "Configurative Analysis," in World Politics and Personal Insecurity (New York: The Free Press, 1965 edit.), p. 15.

32

B R U C E L A N N E S S M I T H *

We are meeting to ponder our memories of a great social scientist. Harold D. Lasswell was a major contributor in fields as diverse as the objectification and quantification of psychoanalytic interviews; the theory of elite and mass communication; the principles of legal education; the com­parative analysis of value-constellations; the sociology of policies—local, provincial, national and global; and the the­ory and practice of human rights in the context of a plane­tary social order.

In my own field—the analysis of the evolving world social system—Harold Lasswell's reputation is established as a theorist and researcher, and also as a founder and president of the World Academy of Art and Science, and as an early promoter of the United Nations' World University, now getting under way in Tokyo.

Undoubtedly, Harold's methods and findings will be eval­uated by many specialists, here and elsewhere, for a long time to come. I myself have tried to trace his intellectual evolution as a whole (in an essay, "The Mystifying Intellec­tual History of Harold D. Lasswell," pp. 41-105 in Arnold A. Rogow, ed., Politics, Personality and Social Science in the

Twentieth Century).

At our meeting today, though, I would like to leave these matters to others. I simply want to offer instead a few rather personal reminiscences and comments about Harold as a

•Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Michigan State University. Professor

Smith spoke of "HDL as a Teacher and Academic Adviser".

33

human being, and Harold in his roles as a teacher and as an academic advisor.

Very often, when we think of a professor, we think mainly of the Great Books he has published, or the Grand Theory he created or modified, or the Great Research Pro­jects on which he worked. But we all know that no less important is his style as a classroom teacher, which may set distinctive images of enlightenment and the good life in the minds of successive generations of young people. And very closely related is his style as an academic advisor, a mentor, an offerer of advice and encouragement to individual stu­dents and assistants in choosing their curricula, in develop­ing their intellectual habits and criteria, and in building their own careers.

I think I can speak on these aspects of Harold's work because it happened that Harold was one of my two or three most influential teachers, and acted as my principal academic advisor, during the six years I spent as an undergraduate and graduate student at the University of Chicago. In addition, I became one of his several research assistants during five of those six years.

All this began a long time ago, yet only yesterday. One windy autumn afternoon in 1930,I trudged across the cam­pus of the University of Chicago to enrol for my junior year. After some hesitation, I had just decided to declare a major in political science. Naturally, my feet were chilly. I stepped into the University Bookstore to warm them up.

Near the front door was a table displaying some recent books from the University of Chicago Press. I picked up one of them, mainly because it had on its cover a rather arresting modernistic abstraction. It also had the inky, gluey smell of a book that might have come off the press that very day.

On page 1, my attention was caught by a rather pithy

34

sentence. It read: "Political Science without biography is a form of taxidermy." After one or two pages more, it seemed to me that this writer was not only a catchy phrasemaker, but a person who had some sensible things to say, and said them learnedly.

Right there in the Bookstore, I read quite a bit more of the book—at one standing, so to speak. In those days of the Great Depression, I could not buy very many books, so I often read them in the Bookstore, for free. But when it came time for the Bookstore to close, I bought this book, with one of my last dollars.

I then realized it was too late to enroll that day, so I just went back to my room and spent the rest of the night reading the book. It was simply too interesting to put down.

I think I must have been one of the first people in the world to read Psychopathology and Politics. I still have that yellowed first edition.

The next day, when I finally reached the enrolment office, I was told I had better talk my program over with an aca­demic advisor, who would be found in a room on the third floor.

The door up there was opened by a tall, very skinny young man with a startling Prussian brush haircut, a sallow com­plexion, very big ears, and very bright eyes. He spoke tersely, in a businesslike tone.

"My name is Lasswell," he said. "Can I help you?"

I replied with a question whose abruptness, I now see, might have been rather tactless.

"Are you the man who wrote Psychopathology and Poli­

tics?" I asked. "I did," he replied, rather guardedly. "I read it last night," I said. "I couldn't put it down. I bet it

will make you famous, if you're not already."

35

He seemed to smile, just slightly, at this rash undergradu­ate prediction.

"Come in," he said, still rather cautiously. "I didn't know it was off the press. What did you make of it?"

I told him I had felt especially enlightened by the chapter entitled "A New Technique of Thinking." It dealt, as a great many readers are now aware, with the use of Freudian and neo-Freudian methods of free association as a means of gaining new perspectives and new information for self-analysis and for the social sciences. Also, I told him, I had learned quite a lot from the related chapters on "The Pro­longed Interview" and on "The Personality System."

After that rather breathless opening, I then told him I had come for his advice on my schedule of courses for the com­ing year. Somewhat to my surprise, he did not at once start talking about courses, or about credit-requirements. Instead, he began asking questions: about my family background; about my experiences of life up to that point; and about my preferences and expectations concerning a career. It was a life-history interview that would have done credit to W. I. Thomas—who, as I learned later, was one of Harold's favor­ite scholars. From Thomas, as well as from Freud, he had derived the idea that it is an academic advisor's job to aid in developing the student's total personality, not just that small part of the student's ego-structure that is concerned with grades, degrees and job-openings.

As it happened, Harold's interview brought out the fact that I had just returned from a year of study in universities in China and Japan, a part of the world where he had not yet been. It also happened that he was recently back from studies in the universities, and on the psychoanalytic couches, of Western Europe, where / had not yet been. So

36

each of us had a lot of questions for the other, and there was much to talk about.

Harold was then 28, about 7 years older than I. From my perspective, at age 21, he was elderly enough to deserve a great deal of deference—especially in view of his book and his generally high levels of information and vocabulary. However, this age-gap between us was not so great as to inhibit a high degree of candor, or to put a gag on gutty humor, or to preclude a degree of skepticism about some of the more conventional professors.

At any rate, after much talk, we finally did get my curricu­lum worked out. The following year, while I was still a senior, he asked if I would care to become one of his several research assistants. And thus began a professional and per­sonal friendship that lasted for almost half a century, until his death last December.

You may wonder how Harold acted in the classroom in those days. I think most of the undergraduates thought he was pretty awful, at least during my six years at Chicago. Possibly he changed his style in later years, but I am inclined to think he didn't change much.

Then, as always, I suppose, the sort of professor who was most popular with the undergraduates was the one who produced a firm, self-explanatory course-outline on the first day, followed the outline so closely, in self-consciously humorous lectures, that anyone could easily take notes, and then gave an exam that was entirely predictable from those notes. As you can imagine, Harold never did this—at least, not in those days.

On this and other important points about pedagogy, Harold agreed with Robert M. Hutchins, that lordly prodigy from the Yale Law School who, in 1929, at the age of 30,

37

became President, or Boy King, of the University of Chicago. Hutchins was a great theorist of pedagogy, as we all know. And Hutchins asserted, with no fear whatever of contradiction, that a professor should never lecture on cam­pus about the established or accepted findings of science. Accepted knowledge, said Hutchins, could better be pub­lished in books and articles, which the student could read and ponder at his own pace, quite free from any frantic need to scribble and memorize lecture-notes.

Every moment in the classroom, said Hutchins, should be used in a dialogue about controversial ideas, such as the nature of knowledge, or of law or justice, or to introduce untried but promising research-proposals on which there was, as yet, no accepted body of knowledge. Each person, therefore, should raise for discussion some issue of philos­ophy or some idea for research, which everyone else would then discuss from his own perspective, as best he could, in the manner of Plato's symposia.

This actually was the approach that Harold was already using. Very probably, though, Harold was not as much in­spired as Hutchins by reveries about Plato's Academy. What motivated Harold more, I think, was his own extreme skep­ticism about received and accepted knowledge. And also he had his own very strong beliefs about the value of free association as a way of discovering and testing ideas. These beliefs were of course derived from his own then-recent experiences under psychoanalysis.

Therefore, whatever the title of Harold's course, he was likely to stride rapidly into the classroom, to gaze benignly about, and then to say softly and pleasantly to some dumb­founded student, "Well, what are you fantasying about just now?" Or perhaps he would say, "What did you read yesterday?"

38

But these obviously are questions that many a student— especially an undergraduate—might find it indiscreet to answer too directly.

Thus, having elicited no scientifically valuable responses, to speak of, from one or two members of the class, Harold was very likely to open calmly a folder of notes he just happened to have in his pocket. These notes generally hap­pened to be on one of his many currently unfinished articles or research projects. He would associate more or less freely for the rest of the hour on some of the unanswered ques­tions in his own mind. Some of these associations were very provocative and very witty, indeed; but often they were al­most impossible to take orderly notes on. So the big enrol­ments continued to go to those teachers who would tell you what to remember and then test your memory of it.

But if, as many apparently thought, Harold was awful in the classroom, there were many, including myself, who got much enlightenment from the patient, thoughtful, penetrat­ing critiques he gave our research papers—for those were the days when you wrote a research paper in practically every course at Chicago.

And there were many—again including myself—who thought Harold quite wonderful as an academic advisor. Very much like Hutchins—or, indeed, like Plato or Aristotle or a French encyclopediste—he truly felt that no field of knowledge ought to be alien to the educated person. He constantly astounded political science advisees by saying things like this:

"You really ought to read as much in economics—especially in comparative economics, and in economic history—and in sociol­ogy and in cultural anthropology as you read in political science fields like public administration or public law or international

39

relations or the history of social philosophy. After all, we don't

want anyone around here to be a mental cripple.

"And of course you've got to have several courses in the philos­

ophy of science, and in research methodology. And don't miss

statistics. No one can think at all unless he's relevantly grounded

in statistics, you know.

"But don't take any courses in history, if you can help it. History

is too important for courses. History is absolutely essential for

understanding anything, of course, but there's simply too much to

cover. It's very much more efficient to cover history by simply

reading it for yourself. Just go around to each of the people in the

History Department and ask for his reading list. And don't be

provincial about it. Some of those fellows are much too Europe-

oriented. Be sure you cover Middle Eastern and Asian and Soviet

history. And African and Latin American. Ancient and modern, of

course. What we want to develop is transgenerational history that

is rigorously disciplined by social-scientific and psychoanalytic

methodology. Anything else is just anecdotes. Just anecdotes.

"Foreign languages? Oh, yes. Obviously. But in college you'll

only have time to get a working knowledge of two or three

languages. Probably German, Russian and Chinese would be the

most useful during your career. Just take two or three courses in

each of those. Then you can learn more about them, later on, as

you need to.

"By all means get into social psychology. By all means. Nobody

can ever study personality too much. And personality is always a

specific bundle of roles in a specific social system—or, in our times,

in several social systems.

"And get into psychiatry, too. The more psychiatry you know,

the more it helps in everything you do. Practically everybody you

and I know needs a psychiatrist. Especially the teachers and the

political leaders, of course.

"By the way, there's a lecture series about to start at the Institute

for Psychoanalysis. You won't want to miss the talks by Erich

Fromm. Or the ones by Karen Horney, either.

40

"No, I guess you can't get credit on this campus for those

lectures. Not yet. Oh, well. Just go and listen anyway. We mustn't

let the universities block the road to education forever, must we?

"If you really need credit, just sign up for some course or other

under me. Don't bother to come to class unless you have some

spare time. Just read some relevant books, and write me a short

paper about those Institute lectures. Here. You might like to read

this list of books on psychoanalysis before you go up there. This

list is an addition to the list in Psychopathology and Politics, of

course.

"But don't think for a minute that a social science major should

not keep abreast of the natural sciences. Every year they discover

something that might change the whole trend of history. So get

into biology—theoretical biology. Keep up with theoretical phys­

ics, and chemistry, especially with their applications to industry

and weapons. And psychosomatic medicine, too—Flanders Dun­

bar's summaries of it, for instance. Great things are happening in

psychopharmacology these days, though probably it's overrated by

comparison with interpersonal psychoanalysis. Drugs may be used

some day in social control, you know—Machiavelli, MD."

And so it went.

W h a t was really amazing, besides the amount of reading

that Harold imagined a student could do, and besides his

absorpt ion in his researches (on which three or four of his

students were always employed), was his utter willingness to

d r o p his own work instantly, and to talk at any length about

anything with any student—graduate or undergraduate—

who dropped in at his office.

It seemed to me that he was always typing something

when I went in, so at first I tried asking for appo in tments ,

fearing that I would interrupt his train of thought. But it

turned out that he was usually more eager to talk than to

type. And for at least half a dozen of us, graduates or under-

grads, the talk was too good to miss.

41

Convinced as he was of the supreme importance of con­versation, he was always willing, also, to talk with small groups of students who got together in the evenings for bull sessions, or to talk about issues in what he was later to term "the policy sciences." Over and over, he patiently tutored small groups or individuals on the clarification of their own values and goals; on the dynamics of personality; on the characteristics of elites and of social structures; and on tech­niques for gathering information and meaningful trend-line data about the world-wide skill-struggle, the garrison state, and the world-wide "democratic commonwealth" he thought it might be possible to bring about.

And, very often, he arranged for his advisees to have one-to-one conversations with other intellectual VIP's who visited the campus from time to time. In this way, for exam­ple, some of us met John Dollard, later of the Yale Institute of Human Relations; Harry Stack Sullivan, later of the William Alanson White Psychiatric Foundation; and a var­iety of prominent economists, journalists, politicians and public administrators.

Even more importantly, Harold did something for his advisees that I have never known any other advisor to do: he arranged for a number of us to get greatly reduced rates for didactic or therapeutic analyses at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, or privately, with other analysts. This very obviously had profound effects on those students' later life­styles and intellectual growth.

One of the beneficiaries of this, I believe, was Bingham Dai, later a famous comparative sociologist and comparative psychiatrist at the Peking Union Medical College and at Fisk and Duke Universities. Another was Mousheng Lin, later the author of two excellent books on Chinese political thought, who served for some 20 years in the United

42

Nations Commission on Human Rights, rising to be its Executive Director.

Through Harold's arrangements, I was myself able to have an unforgettable year of psychoanalytic interviews at the Institute with his wise and gentle friend, Karen Horney. Her penetrating analytic abilities were in many ways very different from Harold's, but in many ways complementary. Her insights, her quiet, sensitive personal style and her in-dustriousness become as influential, I think, in shaping her students' lives as the advice and example of Harold himself. Like Harold, she not only agreed with but embodied, in my view, those famous words of Sigmund Freud in his old age: "When all is said and done, the truly precious things in life are knowledge, work and love."

For lack of time, I must close now without mentioning more of the many things that Harold did for his students and advisees, and for many others, over many years.

That energetic and incredibly productive career is ended now. But what fun it would be if we could imagine this kindly, hardworking man still in existence, in some corner of the cosmos that is suffused with enlightenment and affection—still mixing his powerful double scotches, still looking forward to a gargantuan gourmet dinner, still scrib­bling a pocketful of notes on yet another book about the shaping and sharing of the truly precious things in life.

43

MARY ELLEN CALDWELL*

Great men . . . light up their time, either by discovering unex­pected and fertile phenomena which open up new paths and reveal unknown horizons, or by generalizing acquired scientific facts and disclosing truths which their predecessors had not perceived. —Claude Bernard

From the very first, Lasswell's formulation of his closed system of value categories for analysis of the social process was the subject of some consternation and dispute. One question which intrigued me and the several generations of my students, both American and foreign, was the seeming omission of beauty, that is, the demand for satisfaction of the aesthetic sense. The absence of this ninth value was particu­larly conspicuous in the light of what is known about Lass-well's deep appreciation of art and art forms. His associa­tions and long-time friendships with many artists, his affiliations with museum boards, his appreciation of the world's great literature, his technical acquaintance with vis­ual art forms, and his constant recommendation of planned environments such as the "social planetarium" to stimulate the intellectual and creative needs of people of all ages and places: all these attest to his own recognition of the human demand to satisfy an aesthetic component for the wholeness of life.

His response to the direct question: where do we account for beauty and art in the 8-value system, was immediate, brief, and initially (to me at least) unsatisfactory. Essentially,

•Professor of Law, University of Florida. Professor Caldwell spoke of "Some Aes­

thetic Dimensions of Harold Lasswell's Pursuit of Enlightenment".

44

that response was: aesthetic values are nothing more than skill; skill in the arrangement of component parts. Some obvious examples are architecture, flower arrangements, poetry, music, dance, gourmet foods, and mathematical and scientific theories—the essential test of each is its elegance and simplicity.

Further inquiry evoked his conception of creativity, defined loosely as skill in the perception of likenesses among seemingly disparate phenomena, of whatever genre, and the reorganization of insights and theories taking into account these similarities or likenesses; a free associational thought process akin to metaphor-in-action. These two skills, the aesthetic and the creative (if indeed they are separable), were among the most powerful base values Lasswell brought to bear in the pursuit of his primary goal, enlightenment. Lasswell's passion for knowledge to become enlightened and to disseminate knowledge, truth, and information was his most striking characteristic. Every encounter with animate and inanimate matter and with the tangible and the intangi­ble artifacts of culture was for him an intense learning expe­rience. His intellectual sensors mined his environments in­tensely without interruption with steady pursuit of that goal, enlightenment. From my point of view, it was precisely these qualities that placed Harold Lasswell among the fore­most thinkers and scientists of this century.

Enlightenment and its concomitant elements of discovery, synthesis, thesis, and wisdom are celebrated everywhere. An example is this year's commemoration of Albert Einstein's birth 100 years ago. Einstein, at the age of sixty-seven was induced to write what have become known as his "autobio­graphical notes."1 They contain some passages which paral­lel in remarkable detail what Lasswell's friends might have

'Schlipp, Paul (ed.,), Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, pp. 3-94 (1949).

45

expected to be a part of his own narrative vita. Gerald Holton, summarized and quoted the great physicist's words at length.2

It is certainly curious to start one's autobiography not with where and when one was born, the names of one's parents, and similar personal details, but to focus instead on the question: "What, precisely, is 'thinking'?" Einstein explains . . . why he has to start his "obituary" in this way: "For the essential in the being of a man of my type lies precisely in what he thinks and how he thinks, not in what he does or suffers."

With this viewpoint, thinking is not a joy or a chore added to the daily existence. It is the essence of man's very being, and the tool by which . .. the other "merely personal" parts of existence can be mastered. . . . When the mind grasps the "extra-personal" part of the world—that part which is not tied to shifting desires and moods—it gains knowledge which all men and women can share regardless of individual conditions.

Scientific imagination is frequently "extra-personal",3 for Lasswell as well as Einstein it was not just idiosyncratic. Like other extraordinary persons, Einstein felt "that the personal, moment-to-moment existence, dominated by ever-changing wishes, hopes, and primitive feelings" is a barrier to full contemplation of the world's great, external riddles. For those who knew Lasswell, it is clear that he made every effort to reach beyond the narrow confines of swirling per­sonal experience to gain a lucid image of being and becom­ing, of the infinitely varied potentials of the unfolding future.

Lest these observations seem too far away from the main theme of these remarks, recall that Lasswell himself, in 1935, quoted Albert Einstein, in what has been termed an

2 Holton, in French, A.P., Einstein, A Centenary Volume, pp. 154-155 (1979).

^ See Gerald, Holton, The Scientific Imagination: Case Studies (1978).

46

"autobiographical hint" about Lasswell's introspective mind

and personality.4

"I am a horse for a single harness, not cut out for tandem or teamwork. I have never belonged wholeheartedly to country or state, to my circle of friends, or even to my own family. These ties have always been accompanied by a vague aloofness,—and the wish to withdraw into myself increases with the years. . . . My passionate interest in social justice and social responsibility has always stood in curious contrast to a marked lack of desire for direct association with men and women."

Bits of that quotation properly characterize Lasswell's essen­tial demand for privacy and abstinence from deep emotional entanglements in their customary forms, particularly mar­riage and the family.

It was the nature of Einstein's enterprise and his time in history that reinforced his intellectual lone-ness. Lasswell, on the other hand, was not so handicapped. He was a prodi­gious team-worker, especially with Myres McDougal. His other associates in published work can be counted by the score; unnamed and unpublished collaborators and students, by the hundreds. His need to be enlightened was no less strong than his need to enlighten for the purpose of bring­ing about human dignity and social justice, for effectuating his deep-seated commitment to act for the common good.

To explore further the disparate personalities of Einstein and Lasswell and their different modes of socialization does not seem to be useful or productive here. What is more interesting is the fact that their intellects shared common attributes. Better to illustrate the manner in which each of their great minds worked, I venture a metaphor taken from the technical apparatus of optics, the prism.

4 Quoted in H.D. Lasswell, World Politics and Personal Insecurity, p. 284

(1935).

47

If, as many cultures express it, light is truth, truth is knowledge, knowledge is vision, and so on, then a prismatic intellect will, as does the scientists' tool, take a ray of light, a seemingly simple white ray and, by refraction, demonstrate its complexity. In the case of the rainbow and the crystal, that complexity is the color spectrum which has fascinated mankind, scientifically and aesthetically, from antiquity. Ptolemy's experiments dealt with the refraction of light at the boundary between air and water. Medieval optical exper­iments generated colors by passing sunlight through globes filled with water. Einstein's impact on an understanding of the universe is intimately connected with the prisms of tele­scope and miscroscope.

But the prism has two properties: it can analyze a simple phenomenon and demonstrate its complexity; and it can also combine and recombine the complex into a comprehen­sive simplicity.

These were clearly the intellectual properties of both Ein­stein and Lasswell although they applied their analytical and synthetic skills to different phenomena. The texture of Lasswell's scientific greatness is not easily captured. His own printed words and those of his collaborators and students reveal only a part of the man and his prismatic mind—the extra-ordinary purity and clarity of a mind which, like the prism, could refract the variegated colors of social process, and with the same elegant skill reorganize them with lucid­ity and freshness.

What better memorial to the exquisitely beautiful, the aesthetic quality of an intelligence concentrated on compre­hending the cosmos, than a set of prisms—the self-same instruments of science which other scientists used to search the universe and to peer into its microforms.

This suggestion is not, however, a call for the placement

48

of a metaphorical crystal sculpture in some grand place of learning. It is a symbolic use of an image, which indeed Lasswell might have used, to remind us all of aesthetically pleasing uses of the mind, the joys and beauties of analysis and creativity in our joint and several intellectual endeavors. The most fitting memorial to Lasswell's reverence, passion for learning and discovery is a commitment to continuity in the production and dissemination of illuminating ideas.

In this enterprise, surely Einstein would have agreed. Speaking to the future, as Lasswell always did, Einstein declared:5

It is not enough that you should understand about applied science in order that your work may increase man's blessings. Concern for man himself and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavors, concern for the great unsolved problems of the organization of labor and the distribu­tion of goods—in order that the creations of our mind shall be a blessing and not a curse to mankind.

Albert Einstein, Address, California Institute of Technology.

49

R I C H A R D S N Y D E R *

It seems highly appropriate that a unique scholar who emphasized (among many, many other things) the crucial importance of multiple perspectives and different observa­tional standpoints should himself evoke a rich array of deeply felt recollections and tributes. Included in these commemorative declarations might also be a reminder of certain familiar aspects of Harold Lasswell's public self that appear to have something to do with his varied influences on the total pattern of social research in this century. These are not so much matters of highly personal commentary as they are a recognition of his general style, of strategies of co-action that epitomize his own terse formulation of the social process: working with others in the shaping and shar­ing of values in a resource environment.

Thus we may take note of certain patterns associated with a distinctive way of relating to others. One of these patterns is a mode of "partnering," illustrated by co-authoring, by co-investigating, and by co-leading. Investigative partner­ships with Allan Holmberg (Vicos) and Robert Rubenstein (Psychiatric Hospital) are indicative of this genre. Co-leadership is manifest in programmatic activities carried on with others in the New York Academy of Science, the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Policy Sciences Center. Co-authoring is a dominant enough practice to warrant a brief further comment. A quick and incomplete count suggests that more than 28 books were written or

•Professor of Political Science, Arizona State University, Tempe; Director,

Mershon Center, Ohio State University, Columbus.

50

edited with one or more collaborators, and that more than

35 articles were co-authored. His first book, Labor Attitudes V and Problems (1924) was with Willard Earl Atkins. His most recent published book, The Signature of Power (1978),

which is a provocative analysis of public architecture as a vehicle for understanding political institutions and political life, carries recognition of the contribution of Merritt B. Fox

(son of Annette and William T R. Fox, longtime friends and colleagues of Harold Lasswell) who aided in taking and

assembling the excellent photographs that visually extend the text. If we count the individuals who are co-authors, the >

number is more than 50. Though Daniel Lerner and Myres ft" h-£vs-&

McDougal appear more frequently than others, the size of '/ "'>^>'— " this network of co-authors must constitute a record among - , -^^s , ;

contemporary leaders in the social and behavioral sciences. ' -/L.*? f<~*

A second familiar element in Harold Lasswell's style is t^yiC f.

expressed in the increasingly vigorous role he played as I^JL^ "-~~

counselor-consultant to so many individuals, programs, or- c*~*<-fYf),

ganizations, and institutions. As we would expect, this too 3 < -̂™*/ *"" was a multi-faceted activity carried on in a non-routine *̂ * '•"'- '

fashion: the range of activity is from giving technical advice A ^ 7 ^ on a research project to helping restructure a whole educa- /O— tf^'

tional program. All who have benefited from this peripatetic counseling/

consulting, regardless of the specific substantive problems or issues at stake, will always remember the attentive, patient listening and gentle questioning—listening . . . asking . . . listening . . . asking in the manner of the co-equal therapist or analyst—that persisted until a fruitful and encompassing understanding could be constructed or until self-help could take over.

During these missions participants are often aware that the Policy Sciences repertoire of tools and techniques is be-

51

ing variously and effectively employed to locate the particu­lars at hand in a more comprehensive framework. Fre­quently this was accompanied by the apparent alchemy of transforming a limited concern or perception into some­thing compellingly richer in its theoretical and policy appeal or significance. One reason for this kind of occurrence is related to Harold Lasswell's notable capacity to scale heights of erudition accessible to few climbers, while at the same time being comfortable with the grinding and polishing of some­times quite mundane objects and events for more inclusive and exalted purposes. Configurative analysis, an important tool in his repertoire enabled him first to relate to the specific requirements of advisees' problems and then to sub­ject these particulars to alternative rays of illumination, thus paving the way for the consideration of solutions hitherto obscured from view.

The collaborative approach we have singled out for atten­tion on this occasion resulted in the mobilization of an amount of intellectual capability substantially greater than would have been available on an individual by individual basis. Moreover, his philosophy and practice of co-action, combined with the principle of interaction among equals, may have set in motion the formation of a grouping that does not fit neatly into any of the alternative categories of family, community, network, invisible college, or kinship system. Whatever terminology we are comfortable with, we might observe that his academic and professional life em­bodied an additional model, somewhat different from the well-known ones such as (a) the single eminent professor and his successive generations of graduate students, or (b) the lone investigator who presents his findings in the typical scientific format for circulation in technical monographs and specialized journals.

52

Perhaps it is useful to see that he actually lived by and for the Policy Sciences, viewed both as a guide to individual development and a vehicle for socio-political problem-solving. To consider this possibility is to see a way simul­taneously to (a) capitalize and re-capitalize his work as part of a living process, and to (b) supplement available models for generating, diffusing, and utilizing knowledge for social good.

The myriad linkages of working partnerships and the rules that governed them seem remarkably germane to an enduring preoccupation of his life: the proper and effective relationship between experts and citizens in a democratic society.

53

L A W R E N C E Z E L I C F R E E D M A N , M . D . *

Harold Lasswell, much like "Sir Francis Bacon . . . made a judicious parallel in many particulars, between the Body Natural and the Body Politic, and between the arts of pre­serving both in health and strength; as its anatomy is the best foundation of one, so also of the other; . . . to practice upon the politic, without knowing the symmetry, fabric, and proportion of it, is as casual as the practice of old women and empirics."1

On October 24, 1928, Harold Lasswell was invited to speak before the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in which Sigmund Freud and his colleagues participated. Harold deliv­ered a paper entitled, "Can we distinguish different types among our politicians and is their taking up politics condi­tioned by certain definite factors in themselves."

A couple of years ago, Harold Lasswell was invited to speak before the American Psychoanalytic Association. Harold delivered a paper on the role of the psychoanalyst in studying the polity of his society. Fifty years after his Vien­nese presentation, Lasswell suggested that the intensive and still unique free associative method of treatment could vastly augment our knowledge both of the individual and of the society he inhabits. That paper has never been published. It was considered "inappropriate." It will be published, as have many of Lasswell's contributions, in a journal to be read by other scientists than those to whom it was addressed. We

•Foundations' Fund Research Professor, The University of Chicago; Chairman,

Institute of Social and Behavorial Pathology 1 Sir William Petty, Political Anatomy of Ireland (1672).

54

may hope that it will be less than a half-century before it becomes part of the common knowledge of behavorial scientists, just as his paper on the psychology of politicians has entered into our common culture.

Born in 1902, Harold took his Bachelor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago when he was twenty years old. The next couple of years were spent doing post-graduate work at the universities of London, Geneva, Paris, and Berlin. At 24 he won his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

His mother was a teacher, his father a pastor, and his uncle a medical doctor. During the summers of 1916 and 1917, Harold visited this uncle in Indiana. His uncle had a patient whose arm was paralyzed, but no physical cause could be found. The doctor heard that a Viennese specialist was curing cases of "hysterical paralysis," so he wrote to Europe for some German books by Sigmund Freud. Harold, then 14 or 15, read them. They seemed rather sensible. "It was not until I was a junior at the University of Chicago," Harold once said to a friend, "that I discovered that Freud was controversial."

Like Freud, Harold Lasswell's work has been controver­sial; like Freud too, the writings of his very early period have now become so fused with the common culture that they are regarded as truisms, whose origins tend to be forgotten. The works of the later years of this extraordinary productive man have hardly been absorbed, and in some cases, even read. In another half-century, they too will take their place as part of the common heritage of our culture.

When a man like Harold Lasswell dies, those who have learned from him find that the great and seminal ideas which provoked and stimulated and excited us, that intellec­tual, aesthetically artistic, scientific creativity which had

55

suffused us, paradoxically are for a while submerged in our grief and our longing for the man himself.

So, when I took upon myself the responsibility for describ­ing not only the well-known impact of psychoanalysis and psychiatry upon the works of Harold Lasswell, but the almost hidden, but possibly more important contributions of Lasswell to psychoanalysis and psychiatry, I thought that over thirty years of heady intellectual change would make this assignment an easy one.

Instead, Harold the man has obtruded himself between me and this intellectual duty. "Greetings," I hear, "Greet­ings" with that smile, a chuckle, and a blush of welcome; that formal yet gentle tilting forward, that sensitive hand­clasp and powerful muscular welcome. I must tell, because he insists, about each of my children and my wife. I must assure this inexhaustible man that I have not been working too hard.

It is ironic, too, although I'm sure he must have thought of this—probably before I was born—that this supremely intel­lectual man, who delighted in the study of mysticism and religions as he did in all the myths, fantasies, and belief systems of man, who has formulated in the twentieth cen­tury concepts and configurations which will become the tru­isms of the twenty-first, this rational man will be reincar­nated in a million lives and relationships.

He knew his worth and would accept the idea that his ideas will be continuing influences, but would perhaps be startled that I symbolize that influence in such animistic terms.

Analysts have traditionally shared the conceit of other scientific disciplines that they were value-free, or that their morality was self-evident. Lasswell early recognized that as mankind shares biological constants in varying degrees

56

throughout its species, so it shares value constants through­out its variegated cultures.

Harold sought and found the unifying principle in com­plexity. He saw the configuration within the context. He saw too that the creative mind must perceive the dynamic ambiance of the aesthetic whole. He distinguished myth from reality, stereotype from function. In its past, the devel­oping fetus relates symbiotically with the mother. The neo­nate is separated from the mother into the cold, hostile, unmanageable world. Infancy, childhood, and adolescence make up the developmental sequence during which the adult of the polis emerges. The sick person is treatable. Far better to prevent the sickness. Community stresses can create per­sonal insecurity. Far better to prevent community stresses.

Lasswell's relationships with other persons may be sub­sumed in the word 'civility.' His personal being was an ex­pression of civil communication, humane relationships, dem­ocratic civility. He believed that the widest possible dispersion of the essential values which are shared by all mankind is the only legitimate goal of the hoped-for predic­tive powers and prescriptive utility of his policy sciences. His over-riding value was the dignity of man.

Neither Freud nor Lasswell discovered either the uncon­scious or the essential irrationality of mankind. In this they were anticipated by Plato and Aristotle. Freud's contribution was a method, free association, and a relationship, empathic transference. Freud made a monumental contribution to the scientific study of the emergence of psychological man from his biological predispositions and imperatives.

Lasswell, even as a child, recognized the power of these ideas and methods. Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents is a statement of the vicissitudes of individual man against the constraints and demands of the culture and civilization.

57

But Lasswell the political scientist, seeking to make a science of the study of the polis, recognized not only that the polity was made up of persons against the demands of civilization, but persons in culture.

From conception to death, becoming and being is a rela­tionship of person and person. In the aggregate, such a set of relationships becomes culture or civilization. Within it each man seeks his values. Democracy provides the maximum value to the largest numbers of persons. The need of each man is for deference and civility. Lasswell has provided be­havioral science with the techniques for research which will so enlighten us that we may yet achieve those goals.

In his own person he expressed them, and we who were his students and his friends will never be able to distinguish between that civil and powerful man and between that civil and powerful scientific instrument which we will use and perfect so long as we live.

58

W I L L I A M A S C H E R *

Harold's contributions to the study of the future are profound—and yet their impact is puzzling. His approach to studying the future seems so straightforward and reasonable that it comes as a surprise that it has not been the norm. His own prototypical treatments of the future unfold so convinc­ingly, and are so deceptively simple, that it is also surprising that the task of projection has been so problematical for practitioners of mainstream forecasting. To compound the paradox, although many of Harold's works concerned the future, he was not known principally as a "futurist"; his name is usually absent from the various compilations of "Who's Who" in the fields of futures research and the hand­books on how to do futures research, much to the detriment of the field.

To appreciate Harold's position on the study of the future, it is essential to point out the chronic predicaments and long-standing weaknesses of standard forecasting.

First, forecasting, for all of its obvious importance for policy-making, is rarely considered respectable as an intellec­tual or even practical enterprise. It has tended to be an isolated operation divorced from mainstream analysis of current and historical events.

Second, forecasting has the uncomfortable ambiguity of being regarded either as mere speculation or as an arrogant attempt at omniscience. Most forecasting efforts have failed

'Associate Professor of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.

Professor Ascher spoke of Harold Lasswell's Contributions to the Study of the

Future".

59

to convey the essential message that projections can be tentative and yet still be meaningful and useful.

Finally, the typical forecast, a projection of an isolated quantitative trend to a specific target date, quickly becomes obsolete. It loses its vividness, its claim to accuracy, and its utility in aiding decision-making, though for want of more recent efforts it is often used anyway long after its obsolescence.

Harold saw the weaknesses of standard forecasting before many other people knew there was such a field. In World Politics and Personal Insecurity, and even more explicitly in "The Garrison State", he noted the dangers of isolating the study of the future from the other intellectual tasks, he pointed out the limitations of projecting isolated quantita­tive trends, and he successfully found the middle ground between speculation and arrogance.

His response to these problems was to integrate projec­tion with the other intellectual tasks, not just in his well-known prescriptions to policy-makers on how to conduct policy analysis, but also in the very core of the configurative approach to all political analysis. In World Politics and Per­sonal Insecurity he proclaimed that "sound political analy­sis is nothing less than correct orientation in the continuum which embraces the past, present, and future. Unless the salient features of the all-inclusive whole are discerned, de­tails will be incorrectly located." Ironically, the reason why Lasswell is not generally regarded as a futurist, despite his many influential projective studies, including "The Garrison State," The Future of Political Science, Preview of the Policy Sciences, World Politics and Personal Insecurity, and so on, is, I think, this refusal to represent forecasting as a separate enterprise. His integrated approach made him much more than a futurist.

60

The notion of the developmental construct is central to understanding how this integration proceeds. The develop­mental construct is not a simple, absolute prediction. It is not even a conditional forecast in the standard sense of a prediction contingent upon the occurrence of certain events or conditions. The developmental construct is a conditional prediction of a much more sophisticated sort: a tentative prediction that certain dynamics will apply, predicated on the working assumption that the theory underlying these dynamics is valid and applicable. Developmental constructs are projections of hypotheses, cast in tentative terms both because of the conditional nature of objective aspects of the context and because of the incompleteness or imperfection of the theories from which the hypotheses were derived. These hypotheses to be projected into the future are not to be chosen at random. The two criteria for their selection are, first, that they are potent explanations of past and current events, and, second, that existing trends seem to be creating the conditions necessary to make these explanations salient. This is the integration of conditions and trends, or, if you will, of equilibrium and development. Propositions that can be tested scientifically on the basis of existing data are in­voked in the light of emerging trends. These trends indicate which historical situations are indeed analogous enough to the future situation to serve as analogies.

In projecting dynamics or hypotheses instead of trends, Harold's futuristic efforts retain their vividness and their relevance. They never have the appearance of isolated stabs into the future. Why, then, if this approach seems so re­warding in Harold's own works, has it not transformed the problem-ridden field of forecasting?

One answer—and I think a start in answering the broader question of why Harold's approaches in general have not

61

been adopted even more widely—is that his approach to forecasting calls for a recognition of the complexity of the social process. Conditions and trends must be brought together for the developmental construct to be of use. This means that a historical scientific analysis will not suffice. This is bad news for the econometricians and kindred specialists. It means that extrapolation alone will not suffice. In extrapolation—this ranges from the simplest straightline extensions to some of the most sophisticated-seeming mathematical models—there is affirmation of ignorance; an acknowledgement that at a certain point the data must do the talking because the analyst does not know what more to say. Harold was never willing to accept the position of ignorance; further exploration, further theorization, even speculation can always help. To do this, however, requires a rare sort of heroism: a strange blend of intellectual ambi-tiousness, enough humility to explicitly cast the analysis ten­tatively, and the willingness to assume the vulnerable posi­tion of revealing the full logic of one's propositions.

A second consideration is that in an impatient world, people want definite answers, and what Harold has provided are ways for us to find the answers, rather than the answers themselves. Much of the mainstream enterprise of forecast­ing consists of people waiting around for others to make absolute predictions, to be used by everyone else as "data" no matter how dubious. This impatience with the prospect that the user of a forecast has to do some of his own analysis reflects a more general impatience which has led many to misconstrue Harold's works as dictates to narrow inquiry (for example, to the eight value categories), to give quick answers, rather than as means to expand inquiry so as to encompass more of the context.

To do forecasting well, in fact, makes greater demands for

62

contextuality than do other intellectual tasks, because the future has not yet precluded the many factors which only retrospectively can be assumed to have been irrelevant. Lasswell's approach, quite correctly of course, forbids the psychologically comfortable tendencies to oversimplify and restrict. With specific reference to the developmental con­struct within the configurative approach, the prescription to the would-be futurologist to formulate decent theories, then to monitor emerging trends, and then to explore the dy­namic relations of the phenomena and their context, pro­vides no solace to the lazy or the insecure.

There is, to be sure, a more sanguine interpretation. If Harold's own works on the future have not always been included in the body of mainstream forecasting, perhaps the better integrated futuristic works of those following Lass-well's leads have similarly been overlooked as forecasting efforts or, equivalently, otherwise interpreted. In other words, there are many efforts which, by avoiding fragmenta­tion, have shown their authors to be more than futurists. I have in mind studies on newly emergent elites, the impact of new technologies, new applications of law, and changes in the world political order, to name just a few areas in which the real concern is with the future but the interweaving of historical and current analysis makes this less apparent.

Whether—and to what degree—Harold's contributions to the study of the future will increase or diminish is part of the broader question of the future impact of his works. Sev­eral of Harold's own conceptions—not surprisingly— summarize the dynamics I would like to project in speculat­ing on the future impact of his thought.

The first is the rather sad but insightful notion of "restric­tion through partial incorporation". There will be many efforts to create elaborate categorizations, ostensibly along

63

the lines of the categories in Power and Society. But most will be used to restrict inquiry through a tacit assumption that the categories are the theory, rather than to facilitate an expanding, unfolding contextual analysis.

There will be, indeed there already are, appropriations of the key terms, though with expectable transformations: var­iants of the term "policy sciences"; the "military-industrial complex" as a vague and less vivid version of the garrison state; pop psychohistories of public figures and facile psy­choanalysis of the public itself. To take a specific example from the field of forecasting, the use of scenarios is to some extent parallel to the use of developmental constructs, but all too often the scenarios are generated mechanistically with­out much real concern for dynamics or theory.

What essential elements of Lasswell's approach are likely to be left out of these partial descendants? The danger is that three things may be lost. First, the flexibility inherent in a system designed to "unpack" or "unfold" phenomena rather than to restrict their meanings. The greatest tragedy would be if Harold's classifications were used as the end-point of analysis rather than the starting point. Second, and somewhat related, is configuration itself. Finally, and this is on a different plane, the commitment to human dignity is at stake whenever the methodology of an approach gets sepa­rated from the concerns that motivated the approach.

But another relevant dynamic to which Harold often alluded is the hopeful phenomenon of continual rediscovery, often disguised but not necessarily diluted by the use of equivalent language maps. There are, in fact, two types of rediscovery: rediscovery of existing works, and the reinven­tion of the notions these works contain. That many of Harold's works have been "rediscovered" is evidenced by the slew of reprints in the 1960s and 1970s.

64

Reinvention is, of course, more problematic as a goal, since it seems redundant. Yet in light of the demands and identifications related to the creative impulse, we must ex­pect many people to reject Harold's terminology even as a starting point. In these instances the important thing is to make sure that the reinventions are indeed equivalent, especially in terms of Harold's underlying epistemology and normative commitment. I believe that our role in the future ought to be not only to assign Harold's classics on our read­ing lists for unsuspecting students, but also to continually remind our audiences, as well as ourselves, of the lessons of contexuality, flexibility, and the commitment to human dignity.

65

M E R R I T T B. F O X *

Harold Lasswell was a practical man. He was not a scho­lar for the fun of it, although he obviously got great fun out of it. He was concerned with the application of knowledge to useful ends.

His approach was, at its core, so simple. He looked at the basic things that made people happy and analysed how more of these things could be made available to more people. He took the mundane observation that there is more to life than material well-being and made a science of it.

The science involved using an analytical approach devel­oped in economics, an early area of specialty for Harold. Economics focuses on efficiency in the allocation of resources for, and equity in distribution of, material well-being..Harold broadened this to make his a study of the shaping and shar­ing of all valued things in life. Perhaps the most profound conclusion that came from his approach was the observa­tion—important for both developing and developed socie­ties—that the many values in life which depend on subjec­tive attitudes rather than our finite physical environment are, with proper social organization, far more easily in­creased in availability than the resources necessary for mate­rial well-being.

The practical ends of Harold's scholarly endeavors were clear extensions of his basic personality. In his personal relations he was an extraordinarily kind, generous and de­cent man, an observation which those who knew him made as frequently before his death as after. He extended this

•Attorney, New York, N Y .

66

kindness and decency to a concern with the aggregate level of human happiness because he was rational, self-disciplined and dutiful. If one is kind to those immediately around one­self, it is only reasonable in Harold's view to be concerned as well with the rest of the human race who quite arbitrarily do not happen to be in one's immediate surroundings. Harold's self-discipline and practicality were deeply rooted in his life style. He was not at all the absent minded professor, an image which he vigorously eschewed. He neatly organized his life to minimize his number of everyday concerns. He viewed this organization as an efficient way to live given his goals.

But how can one reconcile this claim of practicality with the high level of abstract thinking and flights of fancy that so often characterized Harold's writings and conversation. The reconciliation is that his abstractions and flights of fancy were, in motivation, not ends in themselves. His imagina­tion was always searching for relationships to explore and his genius was to recognize them where others had failed to notice. His imagination was also a key to what he believed to be the vitally important task of predicting future events. His adventurous speculation stemmed from experience which had taught him that the most valuable predictions were ones in areas where the future was not a simple extrapolation of the past. The way he exercised scholarship was to combine a high capacity for abstract thinking with a staggering, ever-cumulating body of knowledge about every aspect imagina­ble of the world around him.

The heritage of this practical man is of course too great and too multifaceted to summarize, but it can, I think, be characterized. Harold Lasswell gave his students and colleagues not just a discrete body of theory and facts but a whole world outlook that becomes part of you in the way

67

you view events and act on them daily. Certainly in this sense, among many, his life must have been a great success. The intense energy which he applied to every aspect of his life guaranteed a broad dissemination of this outlook and it is just such a dissemination on which he was depending to carry on his vision of what is right.

68

H . P E T E R S T E R N *

Myres McDougal has asked me to speak not as a col­league, but as a friend of Harold Lasswell. From the remarks that have been made by other speakers today, the distinction blurs. Harold's friends were drawn together during his ill­ness. We had a chance to compare notes and found we had several things in common. First, each of us assumed that he was the only close friend. Lasswell was a private man with predominantly "one to one" relationships. After his stroke, knowing that he had no family, we all rushed to his bedside. Quite contrary to our expectations, we found Harold well attended. Second, as Jerry McKenna has pointed out, Lass­well continued to teach us. But it was always a two way street, he wanted to learn from us also. Third, most of us who started as students—as was my case—or as colleagues, began their relationships in a state of terror. This gave way to fascination and finally, as we realized Lasswell's warmth and humor, to pure pleasure.

My own relationship with Lasswell, other than my in­volvement with the Policy Sciences Center, was largely so­cial. For over twenty years we met perhaps three times a year. Our meetings followed a rigid format. We would gather at 6 o'clock at Trader Vic's where we would consume anywhere from two to four "fog cutters". After this, we would go to the Czech Vasata Restaurant where Harold, harkening back to his Central European days, would eat head cheese and boiled beef. His rigidity in this was matched only

•Attorney, New York, N.Y.; President, The Ogden Foundation.

69

by Mac's. As everybody knows, having dinner with Mac in New Haven means Mory's, and in New York means the Yale Club. At the dinners, Lasswell would talk, which he could do for uninterrupted word perfect presentations of thirty or forty minutes. Like Socrates, he—unlike his solo audience—was unaffected by liquor. He might lapse into that mysterious mask-like silence during which one did not know if he was planning a future paper, thinking of some weighty matter or just listening. At other times, he would ask me to describe and analyze my professional observations and decisions. I manage a medium sized business, an Art Center, a Foundation and serve on a number of boards. Descending from his more global concerns, this provided material for his interest in decision making in a small con­text. Sometimes the most extraneous matter would catch his attention. One time I was chastising myself for spending too much time on small matters, only looking at large questions like investment policy every three or four months. He inter­rupted with one of his favorite words, "fascinating, fascinat­ing. If we look at important matters too often, we lose objectivity." He thereupon launched into an analysis of the optimum time lapse for reviewing problems of varying magnitudes.

When Lasswell had his stroke, I remembered a conversa­tion in February of 1974 in which he denned life as a matter of the mind, not the body. When the mind ceases to function properly, that is the end. I reread this in my notes and analysis of key insights of the day which Lasswell persuaded me, like many of you here, to keep. Nevertheless, in his last year, Harold displayed enormous courage, shaking his head and waiving away questions about himself, always nodding and showing interest in the person visiting him. Hampered in speech, half paralyzed, he felt frustrated at being unable to

70

work. Nevertheless, he held back his irritation and despair and always smiled with his usual warmth.

Lasswell in jest once characterized lawyers as "specialists in obscurity". In spite of the complexity of his work, his achievements entitle him to be characterized as a specialist in clarity. In addition to his unique and well-known accomp­lishments, Harold was a warm and courageous individual.

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ARNOLD A. ROGOW*

We are here today less to memorialize Harold—his writings, which will be read far into the future, are a far better memorial than any we could devise on this occasion— than to comfort each other, but surely that is an impossible task. For just as Harold was large in life, a towering presence in the intellectual universe and our own personal worlds, so his death has left a void that is almost immeasurable. In my own view, which may be as time-bound as it is pessimistic, we are not likely to see another Lasswell, or for that matter another Lazarsfeld or Parsons, in the social sciences, any­more than we are likely to see, in the arts, another Picasso, or Chaplin, or Stravinski. I suspect it is all too true, as C. L. Sulzberger and others have suggested, that the age of giants has come to an end; but whether or not they are correct in general, no one here, I think, would question the proposition that Harold was sui generis.

Since others will speak about his achievements and con­tributions as a political scientist, a scholar in the law, a psychoanalyst, a sociologist, a semanticist, an economist— and this is only a partial listing—I wish to say something about the Lasswell persona, a complex of depths and sur­faces that presented as many facets as a finely polished dia­mond. I'll try to do so without repeating what I wrote 10 years ago.1

Perhaps no two friends encountered exactly the same facets; Harold, as we recently discovered, had a number of •Professor of Political Science, City University of New York.

Politics, Personality and Social Science in the Twentieth Century: Essays in

Honor of Harold D. Lasswell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969).

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friends who did not know of each other's existences until the memorial services, and it is probable they related to him in different ways. In any case, my own experience of Harold was that he could be both accessible and withdrawn, engag­ing and distant, forthright and inscrutable. Infinitely patient most of the time with children and obstreperous younger colleagues with tendencies to "plunge boldly into well-charted seas" (to borrow a phrase from Kenneth Boulding), Harold could be short and testy with persons who presumed to a familiarity that was not present, or who ran afoul of certain of his loyalties whether to individuals or institutions. I recall one dinner party at my home during which a fellow political scientist made some unflattering comments about Gerald Ford's intelligence—it was shortly before or after Ford succeeded Nixon—including an expression of won­derment that Ford had ever managed to graduate from Yale Law School. Harold fixed upon him a cold, indeed icy stare, and instructed him in clipped, curt sentences that he didn't know what he was talking about, that Gerald Ford was an able student at Yale and an extremely bright man. The way these words were said, like the stare accompanying them, lowered the temperature in the room by at least 30 degrees, and left the unfortunate political scientist, not normally at a loss for words, in a state of frozen silence.

But I was not witness to many similar occasions during the 24 years I was fortunate enough to know Harold. While he did not suffer fools gladly or even at all, he invariably took pains with slow but persevering learners, and those whose understanding of his ideas and language—no one else spoke or wrote quite as he did—proceeded in fits and starts. And as he grew older, he became, like the rest of us, more mellow, and I think more needful of human companionship and the social company of others as distinct from their intellectual

73

camaraderie. He once told me that one quality of the Orient he valued highly was the stability and longevity of the fam­ily, making it possible to be friends with three generations of persons in the same family. Here, too, Harold had friends who were the children and grandchildren of colleagues, but perhaps that happened less than he might have wished.

I said earlier that Harold was a man of many facets. Not least among his endearing characteristics were the contradic­tions, or at least they seemed to me to be contradictions. Lasswell the man of science, an exemplar of reason who insisted on the supremacy of facts and empirical proof, was more than half convinced the UFOs were real. He also be­lieved that inanimate objects, such as parts of statuary, under certain circumstances, could come to life or at any rate move about under their own power; in China, in India, in Nepal, and elsewhere, he told us on various occasions, he had wit­nessed such events. Harold was not, as far as I know, a religious man in any sense, but he read widely in the occult, and it always seemed to me he believed or at least partly believed in the existence of the supernatural.

I wish now I had talked more with him about these mat­ters, but with Harold, youthful and vigorous as he was until the final year, one always thought there was more than enough time. Alas!

But if there is such a thing as another world, or an out-of-body experience, or any kind of life after death, I hope Harold will pay me a visit. I miss him greatly, and I would be glad to have him back, if only for an hour or two, to discuss the energy crisis, or the architecture of the newer office towers, or the George Segal exhibition, or Sophie's Choice.

When I left him the last time, we grasped each other's hands, and he said, as he almost always said in parting, "Until soon." Wherever you are, Harold, until soon.

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DANIEL LERNER*

Coming at the end of this moving memorial to Harold Lasswell, I find that the things I came prepared to say have already been well said. I shall therefore put aside my pre­pared text and stress two points that matter greatly to all of us concerned with the future use of the intellectual heritage that Harold Lasswell bequeathed to us.

The first point has to do with Harold's conception of "values." This conception was basic to the Lasswellian sys-tematics of personality, society, and the political process. Early in his life, Harold gave "values" their first important pragmatic definition as "objects of desire—what people want." Over the years he then articulated a very substantial schema of values. Best known is his famous eight-by-eight table of Base and Scope values, first published as an appen­dix to his Power and Personality (1948).

This was a radical departure for a behavioral scientist to take in those days, but then that was the way of Harold's creative genius—taking radical departures from the prevail­ing platitudes. At that time everybody was busy being em­pirical, quantitative, and scientistic. Harold, more of a scien­tist than any of us, saw that this drift towards scientism could easily carry us away from the essential business of political life—who gets what, when, how.

Nowadays many strident voices are raised in behalf of a "normative political science." This is not the time or place for polemics, the futile expression of what Harold himself

*Ford Professor of Sociology and International Communication, Massachusetts

Institute of Technology.

75

called "rancorous sterility." I shall therefore say nothing against the johnnies-come-lately who talk about values as if they invented them five years ago. Some of them even talk about values as if they were destroying the analytical frame­work which Harold had constructed. My point here is not to denounce these aimless and not very amiable imposters on political theory, but to remind us that much needs to be done to give Harold's conception of values the place it richly merits in our thinking about the relationship between pri­vate and public life.

My second point has to do with the future. Nowadays we are assailed on all sides by a motley crew of futurists and futurologists. All of them prognosticate our future in statis­tical projections or simplistic prose. Few of these new pun­dits have learned the majestic lesson of "the policy sciences" as taught by Lasswell. Had they consulted his work they would know that the future is not to be known by simple extrapolations or even by complex extrapolations.

One of Harold's great intellectual creations—perhaps his greatest—was the idea of the "developmental construct." Harold himself exemplified this magnificent conception of the "foresight function" in his 1937 construct of the garrison prison state and in his 1945 projection of a bipolar world arena after World War II. The concept and method of the developmental construct is much too sophisticated and de­manding for the futurologists-in-a-hurry who recurrently predict that the world is running out of steam, gas, food, resources of every kind.

What Harold required, for a developmental construct worth serious attention, was a systematics that integrated trends, conditions, and projections.

Harold's conception of "trends" required deep historical analysis of the sequence of events in the relevant human

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past. In effect, this called for a new breed of historians—a type who, like Harold himself, conceived social science as comparative history. Only when these trends were de­lineated in a strict empirical mode could one begin to inves­tigate the crucial term of "conditions," for these occur only when historical zigs turn into zags. Since Harold was an exponent of the zig-zag course of history (the dialectic of Hegel and Marx without their ideology), he made the analy­sis of the "conditions" under which "trends" changed their course an essential ingredient of "projections."

Harold was a unique blend of scientist and scholar. As scientist, he knew that the future could never be known in the same way as the past. As scholar, he knew that analysis of the past was a difficult enterprise. To weave past, present, and future into a truly "configurative analysis" was his goal in creating the policy sciences. Harold did not summon us to easy tasks. He did demand of us, and all our progeny, the highest level of intellectual effort in the service of knowl­edge as power. Let us prove worthy of it.

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J O S E P H M. G O L D S E N *

The chill that we all now suffer from the lack of heating in this auditorium will have us frozen if I took time to recite the little that I have been able to dig up about the innumera­ble times, places, institutions and government agencies which Harold served as policy adviser. The list is very long.

In addition to his publicly-known activities as consultant and adviser to many academic, government and business institutions, Harold devoted a large part of his private life to advising and counseling innumerable people on their per­sonal lives, their careers, and especially their difficult prob­lems of policy decision.

But here I shall review only some of his most important institutional advisory activity. I do not include the numerous academic activities and institutions, in which Harold partici­pated as consultant, stimulus and organizer—much of which occurred in the postwar period.

Some of the consultantships in the earlier period were these:

In Chicago in 1934, Harold worked for the city authorities to find out how welfare relief officials coped with the aggres­sion and frustration of the impoverished unemployed and to suggest tension-reducing changes.

In 1934 at the invitation of the U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Harold studied and consulted on some of the key problems of the Indian communities in the Southwest,

•Former Executive Director, Concilium on International and Area Studies, Yale University. Mr. Goldsen spoke of "Harold Lasswell as Policy Adviser and Consultant.

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especially with reference to the clash between Indian folk­ways and the white culture.

In the late 1930's to 1940 Harold played a significant role in behalf of the Resettlement Administration of the Farm Security Administration on the relations between central administrative authority and the field and the interplay of local leaders with the rank and file. Many of Harold's findings and recommendations were put into use.

In 1939-1940 Harold was a consultant to the General Education Board and the Rockefeller Foundation. Among many other activities at GEB, Harold gave a series of radio broadcasts for NBC at the invitation of former Yale Presi­dent James Rowland Angell. The series, entitled "Human Nature in Action", was an experiment in educational methods for teaching political analysis to the public citizen.

During World War II in the Department of Justice, from approximately 1940-1945, Harold played a key role in the formation and activity of the Special War Policies Unit. The Library of Congress project on Wartime Communications which served as Harold's home base during the war years undertook for the Department of Justice the analysis of propaganda and organizational behavior of persons and groups charged with violations of the Foreign Agents Regis­tration Act and the Sedition Act. Using content analysis and specially developed methods of organizational analysis, the staff of the project under Harold's direction provided him with data that served as expert testimony in a number of wartime trials. Harold appeared as expert witness. The Federal Courts did permit content analysis findings to be admitted as evidence.

Other wartime consultantships were with the Office of Facts and Figures, which became the Office of War Informa­tion; the Coordinator's Office of Information, and its succes-

79

sor, the Office of Strategic Services; the Office of Censorship; the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service of the Federal Communications Commission; the Psychological Warfare Branch of the U.S. Army; and the Department of State.

In 1942, Harold was brought by some of his prominent business friends into the initial conception and planning of the Committee for Economic Development which had as its main task the conversion of the economy from wartime to peacetime. Harold served on the CED's Research Advisory Board until 1950 and exerted considerable influence on both the substance and the strategy of the CED. He also wrote two books as part of the CED program: World Politics Faces Economics and National Security and Individual Freedom.

From 1944-46 Harold was a member of the Commission on Freedom of the Press.

In 1944, for Encyclopaedia Britannica Films, Harold be­came active consultant on both policy problems and sub­stance in the production and use of motion pictures for classroom instruction. He wrote and appeared in several EB films including those on Democracy, Despotism, and Public Opinion.

From 1945-1948 Harold was an active consultant and personal adviser to William Benton, Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, Department of State.

From 1948 until his final illness, Harold was an active consultant and adviser to the RAND Corporation.

In the business world Harold had many friends and others who sought his consultant services. Prominent among these were Nejelski & Company, Inc., beginning with its forma­tion in 1944, and a few years later The Diversified Investors-Service.

These then are some of the formal roles Harold played as policy adviser and consultant. To him, as other speakers

80

have pointed out, scholarship and the world of action deserved a dynamic symbiotic bond. Harold not only enjoyed his forays into operational events but incorporated his ob­servations as data for intellectual analysis. His empathy was deep for the person fully engaged in operations. Frequent contact became a pleasure keenly appreciated by both parties with each deriving unique profit from the experience. I doubt that any biographer will ever be able to establish a complete list of people whose accomplishments were molded and enhanced by their hours and years of conversa­tion with Harold Lasswell, during which alternative courses of action were invented, assessed and resolved. That contri­bution is not documented in the thousands of printed pages Harold left behind.

At this hour of the day Harold would often, as at our house hundreds of times, interrupt an intense intellectual discussion or monologue to say: "Joseph, at what time do you open the bar around here?" Well, it's about that hour. Maybe we can all thaw out across the way.

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MYRES S. McDOUGAL

CONCLUSION I'm sure I speak for all of us when I say we are very

grateful to our speakers for their eloquent and insightful remarks. They have given us the illusion of sharing Harold's company once again. Their words are perhaps as adequate as any words could be in expressing our feelings.

I would like also, on behalf of those of us who arranged this gathering, to thank all of you for being here. I would especially like to thank Dean Wellington for his friendly and substantial support and Robert Lane for his cooperation and assistance. I thank also the Law School and the University, both of which have always been very good to Harold and to his friends and associates.

As Joseph Goldsen says, there are drinks across the way to the left, in the Presidents' Room at Woolsey Hall. We hope that all of Harold's friends here can join us over there and get acquainted with each other. For once we'll violate the veil of secrecy Harold long imposed upon us.

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A SELECTION OF STATEMENTS MADE AT

SERVICES IN NEW YORK CITY, AT THE

NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES, ON

DECEMBER 21, 1978, AND

OTHER MEMORIAL ITEMS.

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S T A N L E Y R E N S H O N *

It is always hard to say good-by to a friend, and this parting particularly brings no sweet sorrow. Many of you have spoken movingly and eloquently of the Harold you came to know over many decades of personal and profes­sional association. I met Harold rather late in his life, but I think it characteristic that our first meeting over lunch lasted well into the afternoon. Our animated conversation left me in a state of acute intellectual agitation and I can still re­member clearly walking out into the street filled, indeed overflowing, with a sense of possibilities.

It is a feeling that I often had with Harold, and one that remains powerful even now. It is however only part of Harold's legacy to us all. It is altogether fitting that tribute should be paid to Harold's prodigous intellect. He was after-all, one of the most original, powerful and sensitive social observers of the past half-century. By their very enormity, his intellectual accomplishments compel our attention. That is perhaps inevitable, but to those who got to know Harold it was only part of a very extraordinary man.

Each of us has his own recollections of Harold. In the past few days several images of Harold have returned to my mind often. One is of the many long evenings, always begun at Trader Vies and proceeding well into the night. Harold was at home in a great variety of situations, and whether the context was small and elegant or crowded and not quite so highbrow, Harold entered fully, indeed eagerly, in whatever lay before us.

•Associate Professor of Political Science, City University of New York.

84

Harold was not oblivious to personal concern, but neither was he overwhelmed by it. I can still remember very vividly a July 4th weekend when we went down to lower Manhattan to watch the fireworks. As thousands and thousands of peo­ple filled the narrow streets, I became concerned that the push of the crowds might cause some difficulty. But Harold, flushed by the excitement of navigating the flow of human­ity, grabbed my arm and together we not only managed to make it back in one piece, but to commandeer a taxi in the process, delighted that we had been part of and survived a memorable experience.

Lastly, I recall a trip that I took through New York State with Harold, during which he asked me whether I had ever been to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. I sup­pressed my impulse to wonder aloud why grown men with­out children along might want to do so. To this day, that experience stands as a lesson to me on the limits we impose on ourselves, and our foolishness for doing so.

The New York Times reported that Harold left no survi­vors, and maybe that is true in a technical sense. But I feel that Harold left many close relations, if not relatives. Indeed, it is an extended family drawn together by the powerful attachments that Harold's intellect inspired and his sensitiv­ity invited.

There is great sorrow in this room, and that is as it should be, for we have lost a truly exceptional man. Harold loved life and even the burdens of his last year could not extin­guish the sparkle in his eyes. His persistent curiosity about experience and his courage and sensitivity in facing it, are perhaps his greatest gifts to us. It is a gift, that like the man, once experienced is not easily forgotten. Such riches how­ever cannot diminish our sense of loss, in some ways they serve only to increase it.

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Perhaps a profound sense of loss is the ultimate price that we must be ready to pay for personal closeness. If so, I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to do so.

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H E I N Z E U L A U *

At least outwardly, the way to describe him is to think of his joie de vivre. Yet, I always wondered whether he liked his life as much as he liked his living. The trouble is that after knowing him for over forty years I feel that I really did not know him. I knew him and I knew him not. But I remember. . . .

It was always fun to be with him. It made one feel good, for he detested bores and pompous asses, and being with him meant that one was neither but in the company of the select. He was very selective, in what he did, in what he thought and in what company he kept.

To be with him meant to enjoy living, even if it was mostly in clubs, in restaurants, in bars, in resorts, mostly public places, and sometimes in other people's homes but rarely in his own place. That was a private place and HDL was a private person who liked public places because there, in anonymity, he could be private. I often wondered whether he was a lonely man. He never said and I never knew.

In all the years he would come through Stanford he was at my house only twice. Once uninvited and without prior notice, he just showed up; the other time invited and the central person—pivotal, he would say—at a small dinner party. The first time he came it was, he told me on arrival, because he did not feel like doing anything else, which was not the kind of thing one says as an uninvited guest; but he was a conventionally unconventional man. If you knew him, you knew it was a compliment. As I have said, he was very

* Professor of Political Science, Stanford University. Professor Eulau wrote under the title of "HDL is Gone."

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selective. So we did nothing but sit around the pool and talk and drink, which for me was a great deal; until he abruptly got up and said he had to go. He didn't say where he was going, and one would not ask him. He was always kind of secretive in that way. I later learned that he had gone to dinner at Arnie's house. He was a very private man.

first met him when he had come to Berkeley for a semester in the late thirties. I cannot remember the year, but it may have been 1935 or 1936. I took his course and found what he said ununderstandable and, I suppose, therefore challenging. Until I learned his language. It was very im­portant to know his language, to read his stuff but, more important, to understand his talking. And that was not nec­essarily the language of his writing. He used a lot of four-letter words in private conversation, though they were well chosen and not those one ordinarily uses. He was not an ordinary man.

He did his stints at many public colloquia where he was the master, but he liked the small group. I remember a small group around him at the Mayflower bar in 1963. I had run into him in the corridor, and as we moved along through the crowd we ran into Sam Eldersveld and Dwaine Marvick, and he said "let's pick up a couple more," and we did and went into the bar, and he talked and we listened, and everything he said was crystal clear because he was talking like one of the boys. He was a great talker.

He would talk about the most incredible things, so strange in fact that sometimes I had to act as if I understood what he was saying which sometimes I didn't, perhaps because by then my brain had been saturated by his flow of words, if not by the flow of martinis, and was no longer receptive, while his brain had been expanded and his tongue loosened. He was a great drinker.

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I remember meeting him at the St. Regis bar in New York one late afternoon. He was full of something that had something to do with mental health training for nurses. He had just come back from some meeting in Geneva of some study section of the World Health Organization, and what­ever it was he had learned excited his imagination but didn't interest me very much, cocktails or no cocktails. But as I nodded understandingly he went on and on, and seemed to enjoy himself enormously being in such intellectual com­pany. As I met him through the years, there were always new things that he was involved in, with collaborators in India, Japan or Peru, or at M.I.T. or Ohio State, or in some law school or some mental hospital; and he liked to talk about it without ever using, it seems to me in recall, the word "I." He was always talking about himself as if he were outside himself—HDL the self talking about HDL the ego. He was not an egoist.

That night we ended up sitting on the floor of a Japanese restaurant of his choice. He was very choosy in what he ate.

When I joined his Washington group injune, 1941, at the Library of Congress where something called the "World Attention Survey"—nothing less—was going on, he was called "the boss." (I suppose we so entitled him because Charles Merriam, his mentor, was still "the chief," back in Chicago.) When he interviewed me for the job, I could see only the outlines of his then massive figure. He was sitting with his back to the window and a glaring sun was shining into my eyes. He looked like a silhouette. I have often won­dered whether it was an inadvertent or a studied posture. Anyway, I got the job and my career was other than it might have been without him.

I didn't see too much of him in the Washington years. He was always off to somewhere, to Chicago or New York or,

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some said, to the White House but nobody ever really knew where he went. As I found out years later, when he went to Arnie's and didn't tell me. There were some seminars at which he and Nathan Leites were discussing evidently im­portant things, but I was still learning the language and didn't hear very much. But I do remember an evening at Bruce Smith's apartment, just HDL, Bruce and I. I have forgotten what the talk was about but it went on until three or four in the morning. He loved the night life.

I saw him several years later, the only time I was in his New York apartment at One University Place. How fitting that address, I thought, as I went up in the elevator. It was an elegant apartment, with Persian rugs on the floor and original oil paintings on the walls and Louis XVI chairs. He was a very elegant man.

He was enormously interested in what I was doing at the time as an editor of a liberal weekly "journal of opinion." He liked opinions and, for once, I could do more talking than he, for I was having an experience he never had. In general, when he had his own experience in something and you would tell him yours which may have been similar, he was not interested. He then preferred talking himself because he had more to say in the matter—whatever it was he was talking about, the Chinese Revolution, or the thought of Kautilya, or the new psychoanalysis of his friend Karen Horney, or the French impressionists. He was a universal man.

The next time, I remember, I had come to New Haven to see his "decision seminar" at the Yale Law School. It was a weird place. He demonstrated. But at lunch he again lis­tened. I was at a small progressive college then, and he wanted to hear about it. He had great hunger for "intelli-

90

gence." One always felt that one was somehow one of many agents he had around the world, out there to collect intelli­gence to be absorbed into what he liked to call "the framework."

Then there were the notes or postcards, sometimes hand­written when he was abroad, more often dictated, but never longer than the message required. He would come right to the point. Here are three of the most whimsical.

When my daughter was born in 1948: "Dear Heinz, I'm glad to note that you have added biological to symbolic crea­tion. With best wishes, HDL."

A Christmas card showing three buxom young women in front of a fire place, after the proposed merger of Yale and Vassar had fallen through: "The Virgins of Vassar said No. Season's Greetings, Harold Lasswell."

When I was elected president of the American Political Science Association, a postal card from Hong Kong: "Dear Heinz, Congratulations. I think you won it on the women's vote. Harold D.L.".

Most of the short letters were in response to my sending him recently published books. He was always generous with praise:

I don't know whether in the rush of things at the meeting I told you how impressed I am with the results of your clear planning and vigorous administration of the legislative project. You are undoubtedly receiving the shower of indulgence that you richly deserve. (October 29, 1962).

I am delighted to have your fascinating collection of papers. Several of these things I will retain, and I am very glad to see them in easily accessible form. (February 19, 1964).

I have had occasion recently to examine your magnificent new book and I greatly admire its balance of data and theory. It

91

is also grand to see your presidential address in print since it

crystallizes what I am sure will be a fruitful line of research and

institutional innovation. (April 30, 1973).

I have read your elite paper with the same appreciation with

which I read all of your writing. Among our colleagues you are

uniquely in command of scholarship, literary precision, and a

creative orientation. I hope that the profession will try to

answer the questions that you formulate with such clarity at the

end. (October 7, 1974).

The praise was perhaps more lavish than deserved. W h e n

Arnie Rogow edited the Festschrift, he simply wrote:

"Thank you and Arnold for the original initiative that you

took." W h e n I dedicated a little book to "Harold D. Lasswell,

Persuader," he wrote:

I am deeply gratified at your gesture in dedicating your bril­

liant essay to me. I am especially taken with the paragraph of

disclaimer, since this strikes a note of very great importance for

any one who is perpetually on the move into the future.

Needless to say, our views are not in all respects congruent.

But I think the essay reaches a level of urbanity that is quite

without precedent in the presentation of modern political

science. (August 5, 1963).

The disclaimer referred to said this: "His work has been a

continuing source of st imulation and suggestion. But I am

not a disciple. Indeed, one of the admirable things about

Lasswell's teaching is that it makes discipleship impossible."

H e was always looking into the future and to the next "proj­

ect." Tha t is why his going is such a loss. H e is an immor ta l

and, I think, he knew it. The universe, past, p resent and

future, was his oyster. W h e n I wrote the chapter in the

Festschrift on his methodology, he commented in "pure"

Lasswellian style:

92

I've just had an opportunity to look again at the final draft of

your chapter on the "Philosophical Underpinnings." As I told

you originally I think you have emphasized the essential identi­

fication with creative evolution shorn of many of the formula­

tions of Bergson, who helped to give the approach a bad

name—after several years of a rather sensational popular

success.

The mode of presentation that I have adopted through the

years has been very much what you describe. Ever since I can

remember I have written with a comprehensive map in view

which was parallel in many important respects to the vision of

the whole that has often guided painters who work on compre­

hensive programs. Hence the "allusive" and partially explicit

mode of statement.

You have raised a number of points concerning levels that

are very important and in this day of "orbital models" where

the universe seems to be composed of many "vortices", the

fundamental way of thinking will doubtless become more every­

day. (July 15, 1969).

I will not try to uncode the message for those w h o have not

learned the language. I think his influence would have been

far greater than it has been if he had made concessions in his

rhetoric. People quote his definition of politics as "who gets

what, when, how," even though they may not understand

him at all. But that book, I understand, was severely rewrit­

ten by someone else, I don ' t know who. It was not his most

significant contribution. But he had a message, was a "per­

suader," as I saluted him. This , quite clearly, accounts for the

fact that once the "framework" had been set, he repeated

himself, like any good propagandist , almost endlessly in his

public self-representations, while the private Lasswell was a

man of endless variation in concerns and interests, practical

and intellectual.

93

There was the conference on public policy research which Austin had put on at some resort on St. Thomas Island in the early seventies. HDL was there and Pen Herring, and we had lunch with them to discuss something or other con­cerning APSA which I no longer remember, perhaps be­cause I remember Harold and Pen recollecting about the twenties and thirties and how they had fun on some SSRC committee and were doing the new political science and writing for the old Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences and felt very "young Turkish" indeed. It wasn't often that HDL reminisced about the past, for he enjoyed living in the pres­ent and always had the future in view. It took Pen to draw him out. It was a rare occasion.

Sometimes, in the later years, I met him at Kirk's and Jeane's house in Bethesda, usually for dinner, sometimes with someone else around, like Austin or Warren Miller. Someone else who was much around for a couple of years or so was Charlie Hyneman, and between the two of them discourse could be fast and furious, for Charlie is a talker of some stature in his own right. But, by then, Harold had slowed down. While his intellectual appetite was undimin­ished, his by now legendary bibulous propensities had dim­inished, whether on doctor's orders I don't know, and eleven o'clock or so had become the witching hour. But those even­ings on Granby Street stand out, with Jeane who really adored him as the hostess. Harold liked to be hosted without wanting to be a guest. He would orchestrate his social envi­ronment without ever giving an inkling of doing so. I sup­pose he would call it the manipulative mode. "I hope we coincide in Washington again and persuade Jeane to turn out one of her masterpieces," he would write after one occasion.

The contemplative mode was equally pervasive. No mo­ment was wasted. Once, when he was visiting at Stanford, I

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returned him to his room at the Faculty Club in the late afternoon after a full day of conversing with colleagues and students and lecturing. I wanted him to rest before the even­ing's festivity. Picking him up an hour later, I found him sitting in the chair reading a book. "Did you have a good nap?," I asked. "Oh no," he said waving the book, "just a change of focus of attention." He loved festivities. "I was disappointed at not being able to be present at the festivities that marked the launching of the 17 volumes," he wrote me on the occasion of the appearance of the International En­

cyclopedia of the Social Sciences in 1968; "I should like to hear what your present reflections are on the way to conduct an enterprise of this kind." And then, again looking into the future, "After all, this may not be the last encyclopedia." He was an indefatigable entrepreneur.

He loved festivities but really not those of a public kind, though he would not shrink away from his public duties. He came, on and off, to the Association's annual merry-go-rounds but never stayed at the convention hotel. He would take quarters at a nearby more exclusive hotel, there to receive a progression of acquaintances or friends. He would show up at the meeting for whatever chores he had been booked for but withdraw when he felt his presence was no longer needed. I think he was very sensitive to his "pres­ence," especially when it was sought, as it often was, for purposes other than those he deemed worthy of his atten­tion. These he tried to avoid if he could as much as he would be chagrined to miss meetings he thought valuable. "Until a few days ago," he wrote on one occasion, "I thought I would be able to come to the Iowa City meeting and participate in the growingly important discussion of instructional material and activity. Unfortunately . . . ." He was an important person.

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It was not all serious business, though. He liked jokes and story-telling. There was no better at that than E. E. Schattschneider. I remember sitting with them in the old Washington railroad station after the 1956 annual meeting. HDL was going out as APSA president and Schatt was coming in. Schatt was at his best and Harold roared with laughter at Schatt's priceless jokes or stories. He rarely told a joke or story himself but he knew when he met a master. "That Schatt," he said afterwards, "is some character."

He was always eager to get feedback on his own work. He would write: "I recently sent along a draft of a policy sciences article and I look forward to your comments when you have had time to look at it. What's next on your schedule?" He was ever curious about others' agenda. "I look forward with especial interest to your eventual assessment of Walter Lippman," knowing that this was an unfinished task I had set myself. He had an uncanny knack for sorting out what was genuine and what was phony in matters theoretical and methodological. He was always pioneering but, in some re­spects, quite old-fashioned. Because he knew himself well, he welcomed many new developments which he could not mas­ter himself but in which he sought to have a hand. There were always mysterious "projects"—a favorite term of his— he claimed to be involved in, and sometimes they did in fact come off with the help of bright younger associates he was able to attract. Others remained on the burner. There never seemed to be enough time. The last I heard of a project he had suggested to me at a sumptuous four-hour brunch at the Plaza in New York in 1962 was a sentence: "From time to time I shall give further consideration to the exceedingly interesting project that we talked about at lunch." He was an eternal planner.

My last contact with him before he was struck down at

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Christmas time in 1977 concerned the possible publication of his collected works. He wrote:

Thank you very much for your letter of June 2 which indi­cates that you and Morris have compared notes on the feasibil­ity of publishing the "collected works." I look forward to seeing you at the APSA meeting in early September at the latest. I hope that we can arrange to discuss the practical matters together with Morris.

It is fortunate these days to have any publishers willing to engage in such a large-scale enterprise.

If I find myself on the West Coast during the summer I will certainly give you a call and hope to have a preliminary discus­sion. (June 17, 1977).

He never came and I did not see him in September of that year. He was struck down in December, and it was fortunate that a few months earlier Dwaine Marvick's carefully selected collection of some of his writings had been pub­lished by the University of Chicago Press. Whether there will ever be a "collected works" is now up to his friends.

I said farewell to HDL about three weeks after the stroke, on a dreary January afternoon in 1978. Jeane Kirkpatrick and I went to the Roosevelt Hospital to see him. He was asleep on his back, snoring gently, more white-haired than I remembered, but his cheeks were pinkish as always. We sat for a time. When he awoke, he talked, as best he could. We were glad he recognized us. "He liked living as he did," I said. "Yes," Jeane said. And now only memories. . . .

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H A R O L D D W I G H T L A S S W E L L

1 9 0 2 - 1 9 7 8 *

MYRES S. McDOUGALf It is not possible at this time, if ever it will be, adequately

to commemorate Harold Lasswell. The intellectual heritage he has left us is too great and too various, and his dedicated, pioneering, omnicompetent and compassionate presence is still too recently and too intensely among us.

Lasswell, a prime mover in the "behavioral revolution" in political science at the University of Chicago, was an occa­sional guest lecturer, under the auspices of Thurman Arnold, Edward Sapir, and John Dollard, at the Yale Law School in the early 1930s when American legal realism was first break­ing upon the scene. He accepted an appointment as Visiting Sterling Lecturer, and joined with me in teaching a graduate seminar upon "Property in a Crisis Society" in the late 1930s when many scholars were beginning to seek a more con­structive jurisprudence that either American legal realism or the positivism that it had debunked. He became a full-time member of the faculty shortly after World War II at a time when the horrors of that war had made clear to all the need for both a better law and a better theory about law, and remained on the faculty, under various titles of distinction, until his retirement in 1970. During those years, he devel-

*Reprinted from the Yale Law Journal, Volume 88, Number 4, March 1979, an

issue dedicated by the Editors to the memory of Harold Dwight Lasswell. The

substance of this statement was included in remarks at the memorial service at the

New York Academy of Sciences on December 21, 1978.

fSterling Professor Emeritus of Law, Yale Law School.

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oped his ideas about jurisprudence, international law, and criminal law, teaching with colleagues such courses as "Law, Science, and Policy," "The Public Order of the World Com­munity," "Criminal Law and Public Order," "Communica­tion and Law," and "Case Presentation and Negotiation."

The importance of Lasswell's many contributions to mul-tidisciplinary inquiry about man in society has been long and widely recognized. For him there were no barriers between the different disciplines or sciences. He worked effectively, commonly in collaboration with highly regarded specialists, in most of the relevant disciplines and assisted in the crea­tion of some of the more important newer disciplines. He was president of two learned societies, the American Politi­cal Science Association and the American Society of Interna­tional Law, and was honored by many others. One reviewer described him as a "one-man university" whose "compe­tence in, and contributions to, anthropology, communica­tions, economics, law, philosophy, psychology, psychiatry, and sociology are enough to make him a political scientist in the model of classical Greece."1 The same reviewer added: "The innovations and scope of his research, the fertility of mind and fluency of style, the freedom from pomposity and cant, the throw-away generosity with ideas and insights, make him unique among contemporary scholars."2

Lasswell's deepest personal commitment was to the creation of a comprehensive theory for inquiry about the individual human being in social process. His goal was to develop a theory which could be made sufficiently precise to facilitate performance of all the different intellectual tasks necessary to the rational clarification and implementation of individual and community policy. To this goal all his particu-

1 Book Review, 44 PSYCHIATRIC Q. 167, 167 (1970). 2 Id.

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lar innovations, including his work in relation to communi­cations research, the psychiatry of decisionmaking and the psychopathology of politics, developmental constructs and futuristics, content analysis, the specification of a theory of values, the collection of trend data and the social planetar­ium, systems theory, functional as contrasted with conven­tional analysis, free association as an instrument of thought, and configurative thinking, were but ancillary. His self-imposed demand was for the most comprehensive map pos­sible; he would tolerate no rug under which the indolent could sweep alleged "externalities." The culmination of all his particular emphases and innovations came, thus, in his conception, and in measure creation, of what he dubbed, and is now widely known, as "the policy sciences." The degree to which he succeeded in fulfilling his commitment is perhaps best indicated by the terms of an award made to him in I960 by the American Council of Learned Societies:

Harold Dwight Lasswell, master of all the social sciences and pioneer in each; rambunctiously devoted to breaking down the man-made barriers between the social studies, and so acquaint­ing each with the rest; filler-in of the interdisciplinary spaces between political science, psychology, philosophy, and sociol­ogy; prophetic in foreseeing the Garrison State and courage­ously intelligent in trying to curb its powers; sojourner in Vienna and selective transmitter of the Freudian vision to his American colleagues; disciplined in wide-ranging inquiry; work­ing against resistance to create a modern quadrivium of the social sciences that will make them truly liberal arts.'

Lasswell's contributions to law, and especially to theory and procedures for inquiry about law, are scarcely less mon-

' Am. Council of Learned Societies Citation (Jan. 20, 1960), reprinted in H.

LASSWELL, POWER AND PERSONALITY (Compass Books ed. 1962) (back cover).

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umental, though as yet less well recognized. He was not a member of the bar, but in a functional sense he was a great lawyer, even in giving advice about particular cases. For him law was, in a tradition extending back into antiquity, a pro­cess of authoritative decision by which the members of a community clarify and implement their common interests. As such a process, law was but a component part of the broader process of effective power that Lasswell had long studied as a political scientist. Hence, it was only natural that he should seek to bring the broad conceptions of an emerg­ing policy science to bear upon the creation of a jurispru­dence, or theory of inquiry about law, that would be suf­ficiently comprehensive, and sufficiently detailed, eco­nomically to locate authoritative decision in the larger social processes by which it was affected and which it in turn affected.

It was in his insistence upon a deliberate focus on the formation and implementation of policy that Lasswell made perhaps his most important contribution to theory for in­quiry about law. Sociological jurists had concentrated upon the factors affecting, and the consequences of, authoritative decision without offering any systematic or precise way of talking about either causes or consequences. The American legal realists had demonstrated that technical legal rules and concepts are not the only factors affecting decision and had intensely demanded certain heterogeneous and uncoordi­nated reformist goals, with little indication of how authorita­tive decision might best be changed to achieve such goals. Lasswell insisted that authoritative decision—as always a response to events in social process, as always affected by other events in social process, and as in turn always having consequences for the future distribution of values in social process—inevitably embodied a choice among alternative

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community policies. Rationality requires, therefore, that both scholars and decisionmakers be as explicit as possible about the fundamental values to which they are committed and make the clarification and implementation of these values a deliberate and central focus of attention. Thus, our first collaboration, published in this Journal, was an effort to add a constructive dimension to legal realism. In it, he wrote: "if legal education in the contemporary world is adequately to serve the needs of a free and productive commonwealth, it must be conscious, efficient, and systematic training for

policy-making. "4

The values Lasswell postulated for determining the con­tent of preferred policies were of course those today com­monly characterized as the basic values of human dignity, or of a free society. To give empirical meaning to the common value categories of ethical philosophers and other normative specialists, he added the institutional analysis of cultural an­thropologists and came up with an itemization of basic values and constituent practices that could be made both comprehensive and detailed in any necessary degree. At the core of the fundamental preferences to which he was com­mitted and which he recommended to others, however, was respect for the autonomy and freedom of choice of the individual human being. Once when we were designing a frontispiece for a book on the law of outer space, he insisted that we draw a map with the individual human being as the center of the universe and with ever expanding concentric circles of celestial bodies and galaxies extending out from him (or her). More recently he insisted that respect for the dignity of man, by which he meant reciprocal tolerance and honoring of freedom of choice about participation in the

Lasswell & McDougal, Legal Education and Public Policy: Professional Train­ing in the Public Interest, 52 YALE L.J. 203, 206 (1943).

102

shaping and sharing of all values, be made the central theme of a book on human rights. This book is now being pub­lished posthumously.5

Another important contribution made by Lasswell to the­ory for inquiry about law was his emphasis upon configura­tion or contextuality. Though man was at the center of the universe, he was a member of interpenetrating, concentric communities of interdetermination, expanding out from the locality to the farthest reaches of an earth-space community. Because of contemporary technology and other factors, in­terdependence in the shaping and sharing of values both characterized each particular community and transcended all communities. In situations of scarce resources and competi­tive demands for values, authoritative decision had of neces­sity to choose between values. Rationality in decision re­quired, therefore, the calculation, within the limits of economy, of the different costs and benefits to all the indi­viduals and communities involved, with an appropriate in­tegration or accommodation in common interest.

Still another important contribution by Lasswell was his emphasis upon problem-solving and the relevance of a variety of intellectual skills. For him a problem was a dispar­ity between goals and achievement; meaningful problem-solving was dedicated to removing such disparities. Effective problem-solving could not be achieved by syntactic deriva­tion alone, but required the detailed specification of pre­ferred policies, the study of comparable past trends in deci­sion and context, investigation of the factors affecting decision and context, the projection of possible future devel­opments, and the invention and evaluation of new alterna-

5 M. MCDOUGAL, H. LASSWELL & L. CHEN, HUMAN RIGHTS AND WORLD PUB­

LIC ORDER: THE BASIC POLICIES OF AN INTERNATIONAL LAW OF HUMAN DIGNITY

(1980).

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tives in decision and decision processes. The whole of Lass-well's comprehensive framework of theory for inquiry about law was designed to facilitate the more effective and eco­nomical performance of these different tasks or skills. Many of his earlier innovations—in such areas as the psychiatry of decisionmaking, the projection of developmental constructs, and the specification of functional categories for describing social process—bear directly upon the improved perfor­mance of various particular tasks.

Lasswell's contributions to the policy sciences and to law have been made largely through his publications, including more than 30 books, some 250 articles and countless other papers, and through his influence upon particular indi­viduals. As a teacher, he was occasionally a superb lecturer, but did not care for the large class and characterized the Socratic method, so dear to the contemporary law school, as "calculated mutual insult." His great gifts for teaching found their best expression in small seminar groups and in one-to-one consultations; in such situations he was without peer among the teachers whom I have known. His whole life was a life of the mind directed toward action. He had no time for trivia, but took a deep interest in all students or colleagues whose primary concern was for enlightenment and action in the common interest. For reasons beyond my comprehen­sion, he once described collaboration with me as comparable to being stabled with a dragon; yet his patience was infinite, and it has been among the deepest satisfactions of my life that our association and friendship endured for forty-three years.

For some, Lasswell could be a rather reserved and aloof, even forbidding, figure. He could be sharp of tongue and was not easily flattered. For many, however, as for me, he was a warm, magnanimous, spontaneous, and delightful friend.

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He was fun to work with and fun to play with; his very presence created intellectual excitement. Almost by indirec­tion he could assist friends better to understand themselves, others, and the larger configuration of events about them. He also had the ability to teach us how both to aspire beyond our grasp and to extend our grasp. For many of us his loss is not merely grievous; it is irreparable. Our best solace is, as one friend has put it, that we can be grateful for what was, without mourning for what might yet have been.

It has been suggested by one observer that Lasswell's works will be read as long as there are people who cherish and pursue the world-wide achievement of human dignity.6

If this prophecy is rationally based, then Lasswell's influence and memory could endure for a very long time. Lasswell himself was appropriately confident of the long-term im­portance of his contribution and, despite an occasional ex­pression of dire forebodings, reasonably optimistic about the prospects of human dignity. In our initial article he struck a characteristic note:

One of the basic manifestations of deference to human beings is to give full weight to the fact that they have minds. People need to be equipped with the knowledge of how democratic doctrines can be justified. . . . No democracy is even approxi­mately genuine until men realize that men can be free; and that the laborious work of modern science has provided a non-sentimental foundation for the intuitive confidence with which the poets and prophets of human brotherhood have regarded mankind. . . . There is no rational room for pessimism about the possibility of putting morals into practice on the basis of what we know, and know we can know, about the development of human personality.7

6 Rogow, Preface to POLITICS, PERSONALITY, AND SOCIAL SCIENCE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY X (A. Rogow ed. 1969). A further evaluation of Lasswell appears in Marvick, Introduction to H. LASSWELL, ON POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY 1-72 (D. Marvick ed. 1977).

Lasswell & McDougal, supra note 4, at 225 (emphasis in original).

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A more recent statement of this conviction is even more assured:

It is impossible to contemplate the present status of man without perceiving the cosmic roles that he and other advanced forms of life may eventually play. We are, perhaps, introducing self-awareness into cosmic process. With awareness of self come deliberate formation and pursuit of value goals. For tens of thousands of years, man was accustomed to living in rela­tively local environments and to cooperating on a parochial scale. Today we are on the verge of exploring a habitat far less circumscribed than earth. The need for a world-wide system of public order—a comprehensive plan of cooperation—is fear­fully urgent. From the interplay of the study and practice of cooperation we may eventually move more wisely, if not more rapidly, toward fulfilling the as-yet-mysterious potentialities of the cosmic process.8

It is indeed a remarkable intellectual legacy that Harold Lass well has left to those of humankind, present and future, who cherish human dignity. In such a legacy there are at least the whisperings of the only kind of immortality that we can know.

H. LASSWELL, THE FUTURE OF POLITICAL SCIENCE 242 (1963).

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In Memorium

H A R O L D D. LASSWELL

Harold! Greetings!

Snifting bubbles, are you, this season, in the land of the tall drinks?

Are they pouring you doubles?

Come back to Chicago, Vienna, Nanking.

Sounding like we know it all, in tones serene as your very own,

We slump in low divans and hunch over brown tables

Spilling smoothly the news about how

you walked upon the Earth once

Welcome back to Washington, New York and New Haven; your train is set to run on time.

You said straight what you saw Without he-haws oinks or meows No winks, curtsies, or knotted fists No cow-eyes, or stony gaze. Viel Blitzen, kein Donnern,

No "ho-ho-ho."

Pleasant, agreeable Hero of our times, "if-then" propositions cornucopiously emitted.

Two pounds of value-sharing for all men alive. Mix one pound of deference, a dash of income,

well-being and safety added to taste,

Be generous with enlightenment.

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Now that you're not in it, More Seasoning is needed. Some of the gusto is gone. In-put, out-go.

Hearing the world's secrets and ours nevermore, You heard them all, and those to come

that we must explicate ourselves.

Thanks for configurating the futuristics. Please to stay warm at the North Pole

under your gray hair, behind your glasses in your midnight coat. Your gloves are too thin.

Come home again, if you get the chance—

The New Year is here.

So long, Saturn! ALFRED DEGRAZIA

December 21, 1978

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