LAUSR

Will the real Harold Lasswell please stand up? That may not be possible. There is, as Zittoun suggests, perhaps no one Lasswell. Instead there may be two or many or, even, too many. Nonetheless, Lasswell’s own account does testify to the possibililty of a single Lasswell. For as long as he could recall, Lasswell remarked late in his career, he was guided by ‘a comprehensive map’ like the ‘vision of the whole’ guiding painters in the programmatic development of their work (quoted in Eulau 1978, 93). Although Lasswell was concerned, from the outset, to promote the application of social science, there were distinct phases (Torgerson 2015, 34–39, 43n on Easton): most clearly, an ‘elitist’ accent, dating from the early 1920s, shifts to an explicit democratic commitment endorsing participation around 1940 – the latter ultimately becoming central to his ‘policy sciences of democracy’ (1948, 18 ff.). Lasswell laid the foundation of his later framework for the policy sciences – ‘contextual orientation’ (Torgerson 1985) – in the methodological opening of World Politics and Personal Insecurity (1935, ch. 1) where, seeking to link his earlier psychoanalytic work (1930) with aspects ofMarx, he cited Georg Lukács’sHistory and Class Consciousness (1935, 18n). Evidently drawing upon the Hegelian-Marxist account by Lukács of the dialectic of parts and whole (cf. Lukács 1971, 8–9, 15, 21–23, 28), Lasswell indicated the importance of finding ‘interdetail connections’ and gradually locating them within an ‘all-encompassing totality’ (1935, 12) through ‘an act of creative orientation’ (13). The principle of contextuality is critical, first of all, in the sense of Lasswell’s early, psychoanalytically inflected dictum, ‘We must, as part of our study, expose ourselves to ourselves’ (Atkins and Lasswell 1924, 7). It is critical also in the sense of cultural and social ‘critique’ (1971a, 158), as in Lasswell’s suggestion that ‘we use the contextual principle to remove the ideological blinders from our eyes’ (1948, 220). Here inquiry is conceived as following an emancipatory logic – its goal being ‘freedom’ – in that the ‘rigidity’ of symbolic