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The Free Press has reprinted in one volume two of Lasswell's books, Psychopathology and Politics, first published in 1930, and Politics: Who Gets What, When, How, first published in 1936; a brief new work, an essay, Democratic Character (61 pp.), is added. The publishers have rendered a service to those interested in the psychological aspect of political science. Books as original and significant as the two reprinted here are frequently consigned to a deplorable fate: they become 'classics', they are quoted and praised, but rarely read.
In Psychopathology and Politics, Lasswell investigates the life histories of a number of people leading or at least active in political life. He classifies these as agitators, administrators, and theorists, and studies the way in which life experiences and personal attitudes made them one or another of these types. Lasswell's 'general formula' for the development of political man is that each individual's private motives are displaced onto public objects and rationalized in terms of public interest (p. 75). Certain empirical generalizations are developed as to the personality characteristics most likely to produce each of the three different types of 'political man'.
The salient original contributions are: 1, 'political science without biography is [only] a form of "Taxidermy"' (p. 1), and there is a need for a 'functional theory of the state, a theory which springs directly from the intensive scrutiny of actual life histories' (p. 13); 2, the intensive study of individuals enables one 'to discern the details of the process by which the political pattern … comes to be achieved by individuals' (pp. 254–255); 3, the 'psychopathological