On Torgerson’s Lasswells

In The Policy Sciences of Harold Lasswell, Douglas Torgerson offers a timely interpretation of Harold Lasswell as a progenitor of critical policy studies and champion of radical democracy. In this essay, we consider several concepts central to Torgerson’s interpretation of Lasswell, including “latent,” “manifest,” and “context,” in order to call attention to the hermeneutic labor required to produce any image of a “stable” Lasswell. We investigate two lesser-known aspects of Lasswell’s career – his teaching at the Chicago Workers School and his NBC radio program Human Nature in Action – to illustrate the degree to which Lasswell’s democratic commitments often blended liberal and elitist tendencies, in sometimes uneasy fashion. We ultimately suggest that despite (or perhaps because of) Lasswell’s irreducible complexities, if not inconsistencies, he remains uniquely relevant to understanding our current era in which propaganda and insecurity remain central concerns.