{"title":"On Torgerson’s Lasswells","authors":"James Farr, Nick Dorzweiler","doi":"10.1007/s11077-024-09555-4","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>In<i> The Policy Sciences of Harold Lasswell</i>, 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<i> Human Nature in Action</i> – 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.</p>","PeriodicalId":51433,"journal":{"name":"Policy Sciences","volume":"68 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.8000,"publicationDate":"2024-11-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Policy Sciences","FirstCategoryId":"91","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-024-09555-4","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION","Score":null,"Total":0}
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Abstract
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.
道格拉斯-托格森（Douglas Torgerson）在《哈罗德-拉斯韦尔的政策科学》（The Policy Sciences of Harold Lasswell）一书中对哈罗德-拉斯韦尔进行了及时的解读，将其视为批判性政策研究的鼻祖和激进民主的拥护者。在这篇文章中，我们考虑了托格森对拉斯韦尔诠释的几个核心概念，包括 "潜在"、"显现 "和 "语境"，以唤起人们对塑造 "稳定 "的拉斯韦尔形象所需的诠释工作的关注。我们研究了拉斯韦尔职业生涯中两个鲜为人知的方面--他在芝加哥工人学校的教学和他在美国全国广播公司（NBC）的广播节目《行动中的人性》（Human Nature in Action）--以说明拉斯韦尔的民主承诺常常以有时令人不安的方式融合了自由主义和精英主义的倾向。我们最终认为，尽管（或许正因为）拉斯韦尔具有不可复制的复杂性（如果不是前后矛盾的话），但他对于理解我们这个宣传和不安全仍然是核心问题的时代仍然具有独特的意义。
期刊介绍：
The policy sciences are distinctive within the policy movement in that they embrace the scholarly traditions innovated and elaborated by Harold D. Lasswell and Myres S. McDougal. Within these pages we provide space for approaches that are problem-oriented, contextual, and multi-method in orientation. There are many other journals in which authors can take top-down, deductive, and large-sample approach or adopt a primarily theoretical focus. Policy Sciences encourages systematic and empirical investigations in which problems are clearly identified from a practical and theoretical perspective, are well situated in the extant literature, and are investigated utilizing methodologies compatible with contextual, as opposed to reductionist, understandings. We tend not to publish pieces that are solely theoretical, but favor works in which the applied policy lessons are clearly articulated. Policy Sciences favors, but does not publish exclusively, works that either explicitly or implicitly utilize the policy sciences framework. The policy sciences can be applied to articles with greater or lesser intensity to accommodate the focus of an author’s work. At the minimum, this means taking a problem oriented, multi-method or contextual approach. At the fullest expression, it may mean leveraging central theory or explicitly applying aspects of the framework, which is comprised of three principal dimensions: (1) social process, which is mapped in terms of participants, perspectives, situations, base values, strategies, outcomes and effects, with values (power, wealth, enlightenment, skill, rectitude, respect, well-being, and affection) being the key elements in understanding participants’ behaviors and interactions; (2) decision process, which is mapped in terms of seven functions—intelligence, promotion, prescription, invocation, application, termination, and appraisal; and (3) problem orientation, which comprises the intellectual tasks of clarifying goals, describing trends, analyzing conditions, projecting developments, and inventing, evaluating, and selecting alternatives. There is a more extensive core literature that also applies and can be visited at the policy sciences website: http://www.policysciences.org/classicworks.cfm. In addition to articles that explicitly utilize the policy sciences framework, Policy Sciences has a long tradition of publishing papers that draw on various aspects of that framework and its central theory as well as high quality conceptual pieces that address key challenges, opportunities, or approaches in ways congruent with the perspective that this journal strives to maintain and extend.Officially cited as: Policy Sci
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