Born in Donnellson, Illinois, Harold D. Lasswell (1902–1978) was an innovator in a number of scientific disciplines and the major figure in developing the policy sciences. The son of a teacher and a Presbyterian minister, he was educated at the University of Chicago, earning a doctorate in political science and then joining the faculty in 1926. In 1938 Lasswell moved to Washington, DC, to serve as a researcher and policy adviser. After the war, as a professor at Yale, Lasswell collaborated with the lawyer legal scholar Myres S. McDougal (1906–1998) and others on law, science, and policy. His broad interests and travels brought him into direct contact with many of the major intellectual and political figures of his time.

Lasswell wrote that "it is growth of insight, not simply of the capacity of the observer to predict the future operation of an automatic compulsion, or of a non-personal...