b. Feb. 13, 1902, Donnellson, Ill., U.S.
d. Dec. 18, 1978, New York City
influential U.S. political scientist known for seminal studies of power relations and of personality and politics, and for other major contributions to contemporary behavioral political science.

Lasswell received his Ph.B. in 1922 and his Ph.D. in 1926 from the University of Chicago and studied at the universities of London, Geneva, Paris, and Berlin in the summers of 1923, 1924, and 1925. He taught political science at the University of Chicago (1922-38) and then went to Yale University, where he was a visiting lecturer at the Law School (1938), professor of law (1946-70), professor of political science (1952-70), and Ford Foundation professor of law and social sciences and emeritus fellow of Bramford College (1970-76). He served at the Washington School of Psychiatry (1938-39) and was director of war communications research at the U.S. Library of Congress (1939-45). He was also professor of law at John Jay College of the City University of New York (1970-73) at Temple University (1973-76). He was a visiting lecturer at campuses throughout the world and was a consultant to numerous U.S. government agencies.

For Lasswell, political science was the study of changes in the distribution of the value patterns in society, and, since influence is crucial to distribution, power served as the focal point of his discussion. For him, values were defined as desired goals and power was participation in decisions; political power was conceived of only as producing intended effects over other people. In Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (1936) he concentrated on the elite as the primary holders of power, but in Power and Society: A Framework for Political Inquiry (1950), written with Abraham Kaplan, the discussion was broadened to include a general framework for political inquiry, examining key analytic categories such as person, personality, group, and culture.

Psycho-political works by Lasswell include Psycho-pathology and Politics (1930), which seeks the means of channelling the desire for domination to healthy ends, World Politics and Personal Insecurity (1935), and Power and Personality (1948), which deals with the problem of the power-seekers who sublimate personal frustrations in power. Lasswell moved toward a moralistic posture as he called for the social and biological sciences in particular to reorient themselves toward policy science that would serve the democratic will for justice. Other contemporary features of political science that can be traced to Lasswell include systems theory and functional and role analysis, as well as content analysis.

Other works by Lasswell include: Propaganda Technique in the World War (1927); World Revolutionary Propaganda (with D. Blumenstock, 1939), Politics Faces Economics (1946); The Policy Sciences: Recent Developments in Scope and Method (with D. Lerner, 1951); and The Future of Political Science (1963).