Note from the editor-in-chief

Excerpt

The evolution of the field of political science was the subject of the fourth issue of the American Political Science Review’s centennial volume in 2006. In that issue, James Farr and his co-authors Jacob S. Hacker and Nicole Kazee contributed, “The Policy Scientist of Democracy: The Discipline of Harold D. Lasswell.” They noted that the semicentennial volume of the Review (1956) contained Lasswell’s Presidential address to the American Political Science Association. In that speech, Lasswell contemplated how political scientists might help reconcile man’s growing mastery of nature with the exigency of human freedom. Only an intrepid “policy scientist of democracy” could be up to that task, and according to Farr et al., Lasswell himself was the best exemplar. …