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.

在《哈罗德·拉斯韦尔的政策科学》中，道格拉斯·托格森 （Douglas Torgerson） 及时地解释了哈罗德·拉斯韦尔 （Harold Lasswell） 作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解释的核心几个概念，包括“潜在”、“显现”和“背景”，以引起人们对产生任何“稳定”拉斯韦尔形象所需的解释学劳动的关注。我们调查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的 NBC 广播节目《人性在行动》——以说明拉斯韦尔的民主承诺经常以有时令人不安的方式混合自由主义和精英主义倾向的程度。我们最终认为，尽管（或可能正因为）拉斯韦尔具有不可简化的复杂性，如果不是不一致的话，他仍然与理解我们这个时代具有独特的相关性，在这个时代，宣传和不安全仍然是核心问题。