Abstract
Thomas W. Salmon Memorial Lectures, given in previous years by psychiatrists, were delivered at the New York Academy of Medicine last November by Prof. H. D. Lasswell, a social scientist known mainly for his studies of propaganda and his application of psychoanalytic concepts to problems of political science. His topic was "The Dynamics of Power and Personality". "The long-run aim of societies aspiring towards human freedom,"said Prof. Lass-well, "is to get rid of power and to bring into existence a free-man‘s commonwealth in which coercion is neither threatened, applied nor desired. This is the thread of anarchist idealism that appears in all uncompromising applications of the key conception of human dignity."But the more accessible goal, to which Prof. Lasswell gave his main attention, is to secure a democracy in which power is shared as widely as possible and is subordinated to respect for the dignity of the human personality. He therefore discussed the types of people who in our society seek for power and provide leadership. He saw them as drawn very largely from the middle class, as a result not of economic accident but of the psychological characteristics of the class, in particular its tradition of sacrificing immediate gratifications to the acquisition of skills which will ultimately bring a larger reward. "We know that middle-class homes are hothouses of ambition, holding their children to high standards of achievement, and providing the tension between indulgence and deprivation so congenial to the accentuation of power [as a goal]. "Within the middle class, professional families contribute a disproportionately large number of leaders, partly because their tradition of public service deters them from seeking purely private advantage in business life. Prof. Lasswell seemed to imply that political leaders' ideals of public service are largely rationalizations of narrower personal needs for power.
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Power and Personal Leadership. Nature 161, 654 (1948). https://doi.org/10.1038/161654a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/161654a0