ABSTRACT
When the author accepted the responsibility of writing a preface to Harold Lasswell's prescient papers on The Garrison State, he had every intention of providing a basic overview of this critical concept and milestone in his work. Harold observed that although most of the images in his book pertained to buildings in the West, the relationship of power to architecture was even more apparent in the dictatorial regimes of Stalin's Russia, Hitler's new Berlin, and the Roman city of the future in Mussolini's Italy. Indeed, Lasswell's emphasis on policy might have led him to neglect or minimize the role of ideas in the political process, but nothing could be further from the truth. His work with Abraham Kaplan in Power and Society was indeed a veritable catalogue of sociology of knowledge potential in the world of real politics.
