ABSTRACT
Lasswell’s proposal in The Policy Sciences that the social sciences be shaped through a policy orientation was a public expression of an idea that he had been working on since the early 1920s. As a student and later faculty member at the University of Chicago, Lasswell came under the infl uence there of Charles E. Merriam-a leading fi gure in American political science-and, by the 1930s, Lasswell was to emerge as the outstanding representative of the Chicago school of political science. Despite its disciplinary base, the Chicago school was highly interdisciplinary and, responding to both philosophical pragmatism and political progressivism, focused on the identifi cation and solution of practical social problems. This practical focus did not mean a lack of theoretical concern. Especially in the case of Lasswell, there was indeed serious attention to theoretical questions. As a consequence, his conception of the policy orientation was both original and sophisticated.
