A Pre-View of Policy Sciences

Lasswell argues that the policy sciences must be organized around a 'problem orientation' rather than the boundaries of existing academic disciplines. The policy scientist's task is to construct a contextual and configurative picture of the self-in-context and make this map available to participants at every level of authority, from top to bottom, in every hierarchical arrangement. This, he contends, is the essential antidote to bureaucratism and oligarchy, enabling improved capability in the formation and execution of policy.

Lasswell describes a detailed curriculum including the use of practitioners as faculty, faculty with first-hand practical experience, internships, professional placement of graduates, and continuing decision seminars. He specifies university organizational arrangements, student admission requirements, a model prospectus, and a model curriculum. The decision seminar is a distinctive Lasswellian contribution: a nucleus of participants explores new ideas over a prolonged period, functioning as ongoing research rather than a conventional course.

The 1951 volume, edited with Daniel Lerner, introduced the term and general rationale for the policy sciences. A Pre-View, published two decades later, is Lasswell's mature elaboration of what the field actually requires in practice. Where the earlier work announced a vision, the 1971 book specifies the training, organizational roles, and methods—particularly the decision seminar and contextual mapping—that would operationalize it. It represents Lasswell's most concrete attempt to institutionalize his intellectual project.

Critics argue that Lasswell's problem orientation synthesizes two poles—the scientific study of problems and policymaking around them—in a way that is neither fully scientific in theory nor in practice. The link between them is contingent rather than necessary, and Lasswell suppressed the political dimension to cast policy science as a non-political politics. Others note that his linear rationality is insufficient for complex social problems and that factual and value judgments cannot be separated as cleanly as the framework assumes.