On May 17, 1939, Harold D. Lasswell, one of the most influential political scientists of his era, entered the WEAF studios in the RCA Building in New York City to record the first episode of a radio show he had developed for the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC), entitled Human Nature in Action (HNA). Over the previous decade, radio had exploded as a mass medium in American society. Between 1930 and 1940, the share of households in the United States with a radio set jumped from 40% to 83%, and many Americans’ daily lives came to revolve around the stories, news, and music that streamed into their homes. Broadcasters like NBC were keen to demonstrate to the public—and, more importantly, to government regulators—that they could use their newfound influence not just to entertain their listeners but also to enlighten them. Throughout the 1930s, therefore, NBC flooded the airwaves with shows explicitly designed to improve the American public, to train them to be “more active, responsive citizens, more able to participate in democratic conversations, more familiar with some of the high points of the Western European cultural tradition, more rational, productive, and autonomous” (Goodman Reference Goodman2011, 36). It was in this environment that the company commissioned HNA, one of many educational programs it aired as a complement to its commercial offerings.
In its promotional materials, NBC advertised HNA as a stimulating mélange of self-help advice and civic education intended to illustrate the origins of common psychological neuroses. Yet internal communications at NBC and Lasswell’s own scholarship reveal that the show had a far more ambitious mission. According to Lasswell, the peculiar nature of American individualism subjected middle-class citizens to immense psychic strain. This was because the middle classes were expected to serve as “the germinating bed of ambitious social climbers” as well as “the custodian of morality” (Lasswell Reference Lasswell1941b, 49–50). These competing demands left many internally (and eternally) conflicted about the personal and collective identities they were meant to develop. Given the tumultuous period in which Americans were living in the late 1930s, Lasswell believed these psychic tensions had reached a breaking point.Footnote 1 If not mitigated, they risked spilling over into public life in unpredictable and destructive ways, ranging from individual expressions of sociopathy to collective revolutionary uprisings akin to those recently experienced in Europe.
Lasswell was far from alone in harboring such concerns. In the wake of events such as the Sudetenland crisis and Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds broadcast in 1938, many prominent social scientists, including Theodor Adorno, James Rowland Angell, Hadley Cantril, Herta Herzog, and Paul Lazarsfeld, joined Lasswell in identifying collective anxiety as one of the gravest challenges facing the American polity. This worry was not exactly new. Already in the late nineteenth century, the neurologist George Miller Beard had diagnosed a rise in “sociologically induced ‘neurasthenia’” as a result of the “unsettling conditions of late nineteenth-century political life in the United States” (Gunnell Reference Gunnell1993, 24). In Beard’s (Reference Beard1881, 125) view, democracy itself was chief among these unsettling conditions. In the early twentieth century, social scientists such as Graham Wallas, Elton Mayo, Walter Lippmann, and Lasswell’s mentor, Charles Merriam, extended this claim, arguing that the speed, scope, and complexity of modern industrial society was such that the average individual found it difficult to engage in politics rationally.Footnote 2 These figures did not reject democracy as such, but in light of a growing body of evidence that appeared to suggest that the human psyche was ill-equipped to handle rational decision making, especially at the collective level, they advocated for various forms of expert management and administrative control of democratic societies, which would be informed by the increasingly sophisticated findings of the natural and social sciences.Footnote 3 Fears over the mental capacities and anxieties of the public were therefore well established in the American academy by the late 1930s. And the rapid spread of radio, it seemed, was only making matters worse. Precisely because its messages were disseminated so widely and rapidly, scholars worried that mass broadcasting was often employed for any number of deleterious purposes: rendering listeners captive to corporate interests, stymieing their creative thought, or subjecting them to political propaganda at times and in spaces—at rest, in the home—where they would be most susceptible to suggestion.
HNA was meant to address these concerns, albeit in an unusual fashion. Thus, even as HNA was publicly advertised as a program that analyzed personality quirks for the edification of its listeners, Lasswell and NBC understood that working beneath the show’s entertaining self-help veneer was a more momentous political function: training citizens to adjust themselves to their anxieties and insecurities such that the social and political behaviors Lasswell deemed pathological would be prevented. As he said in his own postmortem analysis of the show (Lasswell Reference Lasswell1941b), HNA was designed to encourage listeners to develop “proper methods of controlling destructive impulses” before they arose in their internal environment, while simultaneously teaching them to avoid situations in their external environment that would “prod” their destructive impulses “into concentrated life.” This training was critical if “the progressive adjustment” of individuals to the “needs of the time” was to be “nourish[ed] and sustain[ed]” (1941b, 54). In this sense, HNA was intended as a psychotherapy program for the American masses, one that would repurpose an otherwise stultifying medium of popular culture to promote “adjustive” rather than “reactionary” or “revolutionary” personalities among listeners (53).Footnote 4 Recommended treatments included competence examinations for politicians, acknowledgement of the irrational nature of American democracy, and the routine practice of Freudian free association among the citizenry.
Despite these remarkable aims—and the fact that they were endorsed by the nation’s largest broadcaster, which carried HNA over its airwaves weekly for nearly two years—there have been no sustained treatments of Lasswell’s show.Footnote 5 Although the existence of the program has been noted by some Lasswell biographers, the archives of the show have gone unexamined. In part, this is because Lasswell’s influence is underappreciated in contemporary American political science, even though his innovative research on topics including propaganda, political psychology, content analysis, and public policy made him one of the most prominent social scientists of the mid-twentieth century.Footnote 6 But even among Lasswell’s biographers, HNA is only referred to—when it is referred to at all—as a transitory activity that tided him over between his departure from the University of Chicago in 1938 and his work for the US government during World War II.
Yet HNA was more than a casual undertaking that Lasswell used to pass the time between more “serious” intellectual labors. In prior works such as Psychopathology and Politics ([1930] Reference Lasswell1960), World Politics and Personal Insecurity (Reference Lasswell1935), and Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (Reference Lasswell1936), Lasswell had adapted the arguments of figures including Mayo, Lippmann, and Merriam to suggest that the task of modern politics was less to solve conflicts through protracted democratic dialogue than to empower experts who could prevent conflicts from materializing in the public domain in the first place.Footnote 7 As he argued, politics was nothing other than “the arena of the irrational,” or “the process by which the irrational bases of society are brought out into the open” (Lasswell [1930] Reference Lasswell1960, 184). Achieving social harmony thus required the development of a new class of “political psychiatrists” whose mission would be to devise methods of “exploring the distribution of discontent among large numbers of persons, and of controlling such reactions” through “skillful propaganda” (Lasswell Reference Lasswell1939a, 273–74). HNA was Lasswell’s ([1930] Reference Lasswell1960, 196–97) most deliberate and certainly most widely disseminated effort to operationalize this notion of “preventive politics.” In offering analyses of the origins of common psychological neuroses, the show sought to assuage Americans’ psychic tensions so that contentious political discussion and activity would be reduced to a minimum or channeled into more harmonious forms of public discourse.
The remainder of this article seeks to explain why one of the most famous political scientists of the mid-twentieth century believed the American public needed to be subjected to such a program of mass psychotherapy, and why the nation’s largest broadcaster agreed to support it. To do so, I first tell the peculiar story of HNA’s commissioning, as best as can be documented by extant archival sources.Footnote 8 In the second and third sections, I turn to an analysis of HNA itself, focusing on how Laswell transformed NBC’s initial idea for the show—as designed by the public relations consultant Edward Bernays—to instead develop a unique diagnosis of the causes of human destructiveness, and how he advocated for the creation of a class of “social doctors” to treat them.Footnote 9 As I discuss, Lasswell believed that such expert-led ministration was necessary to ensure “the dignity and worth of the individual,” which he regarded as the “supreme value of democracy” (Lasswell and McDougal Reference Lasswell and McDougal1943, 212). HNA was thus intended to support social and political emancipation, or what he elsewhere termed “collective catharsis” (Lasswell Reference Lasswell1939a, 273). Yet insofar as the program was an object of mass communication explicitly designed to inculcate “adjustive” rather than “reactionary” or “revolutionary” political behaviors among its listeners, it also manifested the deeply ambivalent relationship between democracy, propaganda, and expert management that characterized Lasswell’s thought during this period of his career, aspects of which he himself would reconsider in subsequent decades.
While the primary purpose of this article is historical recovery, I conclude with a consideration of how this episode might speak to us in our present, given that many of the defining issues of our age bear disturbing similarities to those Lasswell confronted in the late 1930s. Here I argue that reflecting on the history of Lasswell’s radio show is valuable because it invites us to note the ways in which popular political commentary today—even when it represents otherwise diverse ideological perspectives—remains in many ways committed to narratives of anxiety as fundamentally threatening to a “healthy” democratic polity. Against this interpretation, I suggest pluralizing the conceptual language available in public discourse concerning the psychology of politics. I contend that we might develop resources for reconceiving democracy not as a political order that aims to eliminate mental insecurity as such, but as one that fosters means of clarifying and processing certain experiences of anxiety as irreducible—yet potentially meaningful—components of individual and collective life.
Mining the history of political science to shed light on the history of our political present, this article is intended to contribute to recent scholarship that has explored ways in which disciplinary practitioners over the past century have impacted political life beyond the academy, as they collaborated with corporations, institutions, and governments both within and without the US.Footnote 10 Such collaborations have often been troubled, and sometimes troubling. Disinterring these stories is valuable, however, insofar as they underscore the need for continued conversation within the discipline about the purpose and direction of political science as a political activity, and the real-world problems and possibilities entailed therein.
Commissioning HNA
By January 1939, NBC executives decided that something had to be done. Since its inception in 1927, the broadcaster had gone to great lengths to burnish its civic bona fides, as evidenced by its decade-long defense of the “American system” of radio and its recent reorganization of educational programming under the leadership of former Yale University president James Rowland Angell.Footnote 11 Yet events of the previous year had once again set off alarm bells. Like many other corporations of the day, NBC was concerned about the tumultuous national environment in which it was operating. Of particular concern to the broadcaster, however, was the growing public consensus that radio was contributing to the chaos. While fears about the social and political impacts of radio had circulated for much of the past decade, they had intensified in the wake of NBC’s and CBS’s around-the-clock coverage of the Sudetenland crisis in September of 1938, as well as Orson Welles’s panic-inducing War of the Worlds broadcast a few weeks later. Sensitive to the increasing number of scholars, journalists, and policy makers calling for radio to harness its unique ability to influence public discourse, executives at the nation’s largest broadcaster wanted to be seen as taking more explicit steps to shore up national morale.Footnote 12
To help with this endeavor, the company enlisted the services of Edward Bernays. Undoubtedly the foremost public relations consultant of his era, Bernays had established himself in the 1920s alongside Walter Lippmann and Lasswell himself as a key popularizer of the image of the people as a manipulable mass, responsive to appeals to irrational drives, suggestive symbolism, and herd psychology.Footnote 13 As a professional public relations man, Bernays was responsible for, or principally involved in, some of the most famous advertising schemes of the early twentieth century, including Lucky Strike’s “Torches of Freedom” parade, Proctor & Gamble’s Ivory soap-sculpting contests, and General Electric’s Golden Jubilee celebration. Later, in the 1950s, he designed a public relations campaign for the United Fruit Company that proved crucial in shoring up support for the US-backed coup in Guatemala in 1954.Footnote 14
Initial communication between Bernays and NBC occurred in late December 1938 or early January 1939. Although archival documentation does not reveal whether the broadcaster approached Bernays with specific program ideas, it seems clear that NBC already had a general premise in mind when they contacted him. Thus when Bernays submitted his report to Clay Morgan, NBC’s director of publicity, on January 18, 1939, he wrote in his cover letter that the enclosed contents represented his response to “the interesting proposal contained in the matter you [Morgan] submitted to us” (Bernays Reference Bernays1939a). NBC, Bernays said, was right to pursue new shows that would invigorate patriotic sentiment and community pride. The current moment represented “an unusual opportunity” for the broadcaster to reawaken audiences’ “pride in and love of America,” and thereby “receive much favorable direct and indirect publicity from undertaking a series of programs of the type described” (1939a). Yet Bernays (Reference Bernays1939b) went on to warn Morgan that arousing patriotic sentiment among the citizenry would be a delicate endeavor, something best achieved “through indirection” rather than honest and straightforward appeals. The reason for this was precisely the same reason why NBC sensed that American morale needed boosting in the first place: the US public was “disillusion[ed],” its “patriotism” having “fallen to a new low ebb.” Were NBC to broadcast direct calls for public spiritedness, most listeners would dismiss them as “mawkish.” Given this, the broadcaster would have to “sell patriotism” (Reference Lasswell1939b). To demonstrate how this might be done, Bernays devoted the rest of the proposal to outlining five program ideas and various methods of publicizing them, including school essay contests, NBC broadcasting alerts, and endorsements from government and nonprofit organizations.Footnote 15
In some respects, Bernays’s proposal was in keeping with NBC’s general approach to public service broadcasting to this point. In 1937, Angell had remarked to the New York Times that the intelligence level of the average radio listener was so low that the broadcaster was compelled to frost “the cake of knowledge” to entice audiences to imbibe its civic and educational programming (New York Times 1940). In other respects, however, Bernays’s plan was quite controversial. For it was one thing to use entertainment to “frost” NBC’s general educational content; quite another to employ it as a means of manipulating audiences into supporting a specific political agenda, even one as widely accepted as American patriotism. Hence when NBC programming director John Royal received Bernays’s proposal, he hatched an unorthodox plan for its evaluation, deliberately anonymizing the document before circulating it to 16 executives. He began receiving replies by early February.
Reviews were mixed. Given the mystery surrounding the anonymous proposal, several executives expressed confusion about the kind of feedback Royal was seeking. Lew Frost (Reference Frost1939), executive assistant to vice president Don E. Gilman, told Royal that he assumed the programming director “wanted a frank opinion,” but then confessed that “I don’t know what is behind all of this and whether you are interested in the general idea and wanted suggestions as to how some plan might be worked out.” Taking this as his charge, however, Frost (Reference Frost1939) wrote that he had “no argument against the idea of utilizing our facilities for dispensing propaganda on patriotism and Americanism.” That said, he felt that the specific program ideas Bernays had suggested were too broad to achieve their grand purpose. Several other respondents shared this concern (Brainard Reference Brainard1939; Robinson Reference Robinson1939). Indeed, while every reviewer supported the basic premise of the Bernays proposal, many felt that the specific programs suggested would need significant reworking to be successful.
But other responses were enthusiastic. Don E. Gilman (Reference Gilman1939), vice president of the company’s Western Division, told Royal that the “unqualified approval and gratitude” that would flow to NBC should it air the proposed shows was compelling. No doubt, he said, “certain radical minorities would tear their hair and rage over our presenting programs tending to reawaken the interest of the American public in the American form of government and the advantages of the American economics system.” Yet that ought not deter NBC from advocating for these things “if we are satisfied [they are] correct,” as Gilman (Reference Gilman1939) insisted he was. West Coast program manager John W. Swallow (Reference Swallow1939) adopted a similar line, declaring that the broadcaster should infuse the programs with as much showmanship as current radio technology allowed. For “in a country made up in part by people who can be fooled by a few tricks of our art” to believe that Martians had invaded New Jersey—a reference to the War of the Worlds panic of the previous year—“just straight propaganda won’t do.” To compete with such salacious entertainment, NBC needed to use every means at its disposal to “help make this nation realize, by means of a laugh, a tear and a heart tug, what this country means to them” (Swallow Reference Swallow1939).
Among the plan’s supporters, though, it was Walter Preston who offered the most comprehensive rationale for its adoption. Within NBC’s educational division, Preston served as operational chief and assistant to Angell and would have been central to any effort to bring Bernays’s ideas to air. As such, his response to Royal was more detailed than those of his colleagues, and, at least at first glance, appeared particularly concerned with fine-grained questions of style and presentation. As his remarks unfolded, however, it became clear that his interest in these issues was not just about increasing the radio-worthiness of the proposed programs; it was also about improving their efficacy as tools of political manipulation.
To make this case, Preston (Reference Preston1939) appealed to language and concepts explicitly drawn from contemporary scholarly discourse on propaganda and crowd psychology. At several points in his letter, for instance, he argued that should NBC want to foster genuine feelings of patriotism, it would need to awaken audiences’ sense of their own political agency, instilling in them the belief that they could actually “do something about regulating their own environment.” In so doing, NBC would avoid “stir[ring] up the emotions of the people” and instead suggest to citizens that their participation in national or community-oriented endeavors would help them to regain control over an uncertain world. Preston said he had learned about this “positive psychological approach” to political communication from “Dr. Harold Lasswell of the University of Chicago,” whom he described as the country’s “foremost scientist in the field of the psychology of politics.” He therefore recommended that NBC inquire whether Lasswell might be interested in “acting as a consultant” on the Bernays proposal. Preston confessed he did not know whether the professor was available for such work. Yet he insisted that Lasswell “might be of value to us in such a series of programs,” since “one of the fundamental problems we are facing today in the world, as well as in this country is that of the psychology of our acting and of our thinking” (Preston Reference Preston1939).
Ultimately, Royal chose not to move forward with Bernays’s plan, at least not in the multishow format he had proposed. While no written explanation of the decision has been preserved, it seems likely the programming director deemed the project too ambitious, too costly, and perhaps too controversial to commission as designed. But this did not spell the end of NBC’s interest in civically minded programming. Instead, the company changed tack and, taking up Preston’s advice, contacted Lasswell. Although the precise timeline of communication between Lasswell and NBC is murky, some illuminating clues remain. Lasswell (Reference Lasswell1951) recalled that it was Angell himself who extended the invitation to produce HNA. In December 1940, however, Preston (Reference Preston1940) claimed that it was he who was “responsible for convincing him [Lasswell] that he should use radio as part of his research in the field of propaganda and social psychology.” Still other evidence suggests that NBC vice president (and soon-to-be president) Niles Trammell may have played a role (Nejelski Reference Nejelski1939).
Regardless of who was ultimately responsible for commissioning HNA, what extant records confirm is that NBC reached out to Lasswell sometime between February and April of 1939, and that this communication was spurred by internal deliberation at the company surrounding Bernays’s proposal and, more broadly, by the broadcaster’s desire to stimulate civic pride among its listening audience at a time of national crisis. By the time HNA reached the airwaves in May 1939, however, Lasswell had devised a more nuanced mission for the show than the straightforwardly patriotic one initially imagined by Bernays.Footnote 16
Diagnosing Human Destructiveness
The first episode of HNA aired on Wednesday, May 17, 1939, from 7:45–8:00 p.m., and was broadcast across the nation on the company’s primary Red Network. In some respects, the show’s first season served as a pilot. Despite its relatively rudimentary lecture format, however, its overarching premise was well defined from the outset. The show’s inaugural episode thus introduced Lasswell (Reference Lasswell1939f, 1) as an expert in the fields of political science and psychiatry who had “pioneered in the study” of the origins of human destructiveness, “the chief disease among men.” Lasswell told his audience that there was no more urgent problem than that of controlling disturbed impulses such as irrational anger, chronic melancholy, debilitating anxiety, or violent aggression. These behaviors were increasingly prevalent in social life, poisoning relationships between nations, between people, and even between individuals and their own selves. HNA sought to reverse this trend.
To accomplish this goal, Lasswell (Reference Lasswell1939f, 5) said that it was necessary to learn from recent advances in “modern medicine,” and psychiatry in particular. Research in the field had revealed that humans’ destructive impulses were the result of internal feelings of “hurt ego” and “unrealistic habits of thought,” which, when triggered by external conditions in one’s environment, produced maladjustments between an individual’s perception of reality and the conditions of reality itself (5). It was these kinds of problems that would be the focus of HNA. Over the course of life, Lasswell said, nearly every individual experienced some difficulty, tension, or trauma that led them to develop unconscious coping mechanisms. Such psychic defense mechanisms were natural, perhaps even instinctual, but they often produced suboptimal results. For when the ego was faced with threats it could not easily resolve, its fallback strategy was often to deflect or project the problem away from the self in an effort to preserve feelings of safety, security, and self-esteem. Yet Lasswell assured his listeners that humans were not doomed to dysfunction. Although irrational behaviors were unavoidable, the fact that those behaviors were an expression of the inner workings of the mind suggested that every individual could manage them were they to adopt more “realistic thinking” (10).
Luckily, modern psychiatry had developed a scientific method to accomplish just this sort of adjustment. In HNA’s second episode, Lasswell thus introduced his listeners to Freudian free association. Drawing from accounts developed in prior work, Lasswell noted that the value of free association lay in its power to evade the psychological defense mechanisms of the conscious mind. By allowing patients to “say all the words and to describe all the pictures” that came into their heads, psychoanalysts had discovered that they could find “important clues” about past traumas that their patients had forgotten or repressed (Lasswell Reference Lasswell1939g, 3, 5). Once the connection between those traumas and current maladjusted behavior was uncovered, practitioners could help patients to process their ego-hurt consciously, and in the process eliminate their need for irrational coping mechanisms. The benefits of free association could not be overstated. Soon, Lasswell told his listeners, this method of self-analysis would be recognized as “among the most brilliant discoveries of our civilization,” something of no less import than “skill in reading, writing, and arithmetic” (9, 8).
By HNA’s third episode, Lasswell was ready to apply his foregoing lectures on psychology to politics. Hence at the outset of this week’s discussion, he posed a rhetorical question to his listeners: although he had spent the last two episodes explaining the rudiments of psychoanalysis, why should anyone think that this branch of medicine could provide any solutions to “the great troubles of our time” (Lasswell Reference Lasswell1939c, 5)? Psychiatrists might entertain themselves all they please studying the causes of neurotic behavior and subjecting their patients to newfangled techniques like free association, but were not the most significant problems of the modern world—war, unemployment, etc.—material and not mental in nature?
These questions were understandable, Lasswell said. Yet they were wrong in implying that individuals’ mental insecurities were divorced from the conditions and activities of social life. Oftentimes, individual insecurities only boiled over into destructive behavior because of abrupt changes in the external environment, which triggered one’s latent ego-hurt. He urged listeners to consider recent events like the “economic collapse” of the Great Depression, or the imposition of “humiliating conditions of peace” in the wake of World War I. These experiences had “hurt the ego of many people,” thereby “releasing millions of destructive tendencies” (Lasswell Reference Lasswell1939c, 8). In this sense, psychology and politics were obviously intertwined, and if leaders hoped to address these situations they would be wise to take a page from the psychotherapist. When dealing with “the maniac,” for instance, analysts did not waste time “hating the maniac” or “rush into an argument to prove that what the maniac says is wrong.” Instead, they studied their patient “objectively to … find a cure.” The “same attitude can be taken up toward society” (9).
Lasswell (Reference Lasswell1939c, 8) claimed that this “new attitude toward destructiveness” was already accepted “among scientists and physicians,” but that it needed to be more widely adopted. For rather than presuming that social and political problems could only be addressed using the usual destructive methods—protest, rebellion, war, etc.—the psychomedical approach suggested that communities could learn to “hunt destructive practices just as we hunt for dangerous germs. … We can devise ways of treatment as thoughtfully as we do with pneumonia” (9). The benefits of treating society via the methods of modern medicine would be extraordinary. Imagine if “[p]roper methods of using the mind” were inculcated at “every level of society,” in “the family, the school, and the chief instruments of communication (the radio, motion picture, and the press).” With a collective environment “full of reminders of how to cope with destructiveness,” there would be a surge in “the number of people in the world who want to … learn realistic methods of thought” (6). As a result, Lasswell said, “a new practice, a new form of conduct” would take root, one that championed peaceful, rational, and scientific ways of dealing with the self and others (6–7).
This vision of a mentally hygienic society organized around the dissemination of collective psychotherapy was indebted to the concept of “preventive politics” that Lasswell had first outlined in Psychopathology and Politics, and which he rearticulated in several other works throughout the 1930s.Footnote 17 Here Lasswell had argued that since all human behavior was driven by conflicts formed at the prepolitical and, indeed, preconscious level, the aim of modern politics should not be to expand spheres in which the masses could express and deliberate political opinions, since this would only multiply opportunities for individuals to manifest their psychic insecurities in public life. Instead, social society should be reordered such that the masses were prevented from experiencing levels of psychic strain that would induce them to express their irrational impulses in public life in the first place. For Lasswell ([1930] Reference Lasswell1960, 197), then, the task of contemporary politics was “less to solve conflicts than to prevent them; less to serve as a safety valve for social protest than to apply social energy to the abolition of recurrent sources of strain in society.” By this, Lasswell did not mean that the masses’ participation in politics was to be eliminated: he maintained that the “politics of prevention” would “[i]n some measure” encourage “discussion among all those who are affected by social policy” (197). Yet he also noted that this was to be “no iron-clad rule,” since democratic deliberation “frequently complicated social difficulties” and was “no longer … an especially desirable mode of handling the situation” (196–97).
The compatibility between Lasswell’s concept of preventive politics and commitments to democracy he expressed throughout his career remain a matter of much debate. I consider some of these themes below. Here, though, I only wish to draw attention to the way in which Lasswell (Reference Lasswell1941b, 53) used his medical approach to politics in HNA to suggest that while sociopolitical conditions often disrupted psychic equanimity, the appropriate response to those conditions was for individuals to develop “adjustive” behaviors rather than engage in destructive attempts to eliminate them. To demonstrate what he meant by this, Lasswell (Reference Lasswell1939f, 8) invited audiences to reflect on stories “we used to laugh at” about “Russian peasants who kicked and cursed their tractors” when they broke down. The story was humorous because the peasants’ behavior was so clearly irrational. Rather than “think[ing] realistically about what was wrong,” the Russian farmers allowed themselves to be governed by their emotions and responded to their problem in an ineffective way (8). But then Lasswell turned the moral on his own listeners. Although it was easy to laugh at these peasants half a world away, did we not sometimes engage in similar behavior ourselves when faced with complex problems we did not understand or could not control?
Consider, he said, the widespread feelings of hopelessness, anxiety, and disaffection that had emerged among Americans in the midst of the ongoing depression. Certainly, the country’s economic collapse had created real, material difficulties for individuals. But just as it “takes two to make a quarrel,” so too does it take “two factors to make a destructive social situation” (Lasswell Reference Lasswell1939f, 8). In other words, while the US was obviously undergoing a painful economic contraction, this, on its own, could not account for the degree of social and political turmoil that had come in its wake. In truth, blaming external forces alone for one’s troubles was no more useful than a Russian peasant blaming a tractor for breaking down. Like a malfunctioning tractor, a malfunctioning economy was a problem. Yet responding to that problem by “cursing and swearing and blaming one another” was no solution (9). Rather than destroy a malfunctioning social machine or those we thought responsible for operating it, the most rational solution was to fix it. Hence while Lasswell said it was understandable why leaders felt the urge to “put the blame on somebody else instead of buckling down to the job of correcting mistakes,” or why unemployed workers were “easy marks for agitators who tell them … [i]t is the ‘system,’ not themselves” who were at fault for their woes, these behaviors nevertheless represented “failure[s] of thought and self-control … under stress of emotion” (9). In response to these and similarly sickly behaviors, then, the solution was clear. As Lasswell stated later in the season: “We need to correct them” (Lasswell Reference Lasswell1939b, 9). But how?
Prescribing Social Doctors
To answer this question, in HNA’s fourth and fifth episodes (June 14 and June 21), Lasswell advocated for scientific expertise in and oversight of politics. To do so, he once again framed his discussions in medicalizing language, equating political dysfunction with physiological illness. Drawing on language he had developed in prior work on the integration of politics and psychiatry, Lasswell (Reference Lasswell1939d) claimed that disharmony in the body politic was not just similar to disharmony in the physiological body, but was in fact part of the same class of event: “Disease.”Footnote 18 For in the most basic sense, disease referred to any process that was “destructive of unity.” Hence in the realm of medicine, disease is anything that “threatens the unity of the body.” But there were “other important unities” beyond than the body. Society, or “the relationships among persons,” was another. And in the same way that the unity of the body could be endangered by viruses and bacteria, so could the unity of society be “threatened by destructive processes that are expressed in conflict among nations, races, classes, and civilizations” (1939d, 2).
At this point, Lasswell brought the argument full circle: if the diagnosis of social disease paralleled that of physiological disease, so too should the cure. In other words, if we availed ourselves of medical doctors to treat illnesses of the physical body like “measles, mumps, and smallpox,” why did we not turn to “social doctors” to treat illnesses of the body politic, including “unemployment,” “war,” or “industrial strife” (Lasswell Reference Lasswell1939d, 2)? To lend support for his provocative suggestion, Lasswell scripted a timely interjection from his NBC announcer for the week, Milton Cross. Responding to Lasswell’s medical analogy, Cross interrupted to say that he was ready to agree that destructive social practices were a kind of disease process. But he feigned skepticism at the notion of social doctors. Was not the problem of modern politics that there were too many self-proclaimed healers, rather than too few? “Every politician,” Cross complained, “claims to have a cure-all” for the world’s problems, whether that be “‘socialism’ or ‘fascism’ or ‘new dealism’ or ‘individualism.’” What hope was there of finding genuine guidance for America’s collective ills “when every tub-thumper claims to be a social doctor?” (6).
Lasswell (Reference Lasswell1939d, 8) responded that medicine once again offered an instructive model for politics to follow. He bid Cross to remember that, not so long ago, snake-oil salesmen were as free to hawk their fraudulent cures as politicians today were free to peddle their manipulative ideologies. Over time, however, society had eliminated quackery “by setting up standards.” Indeed, once it became clear that medicine was “vital to the lives and happiness of people,” the control and regulation of its practice was accepted as a common good. Hence in “all civilized countries,” one was only allowed to become a doctor after having passed through a rigorous examination and licensure process (8). Politics ought to do the same. It did not stand to reason that “anybody who wants to cure a horse must pass an examination, but anybody can try and cure the nation without a license” (9). In fact, an institutionalized vetting system might be even more important in politics than it was in medicine, given that political practitioners wielded power not just over the life and death of individual bodies but also over that of entire collectives. In Lasswell’s view, failing to establish a proper training and evaluation program for would-be social doctors was a grave failing, not simply because the destructive impulses of individual citizens would go untreated but also because quack politicians would encourage such harmful behavior for their own maladapted ends.
Carefully constructed though this exchange was, Lasswell seemed to recognize that his audience might need more convincing to accept his notion of social doctors. For it was one thing to say that modern politicians were venal and selfish, but quite another to argue that the solution to this problem was a newfangled form of governance grounded in medico-psychiatric expertise rather than more direct citizen engagement. To address any lingering hesitancies, then, Lasswell (Reference Lasswell1939e) devoted much of the fifth episode of HNA to explaining why a political system run by licensed specialists was perfectly compatible with America’s existing democratic norms. Here he told his listeners that, although they may not realize it, the idea of requiring aspiring leaders to possess some basic qualifications was already well accepted in US politics. For instance, the Constitution set out minimum age limits for the president and members of Congress so as to ensure “a certain maturity of judgment.” Similarly, the founding documents required that the president be a natural-born citizen of the US, and that office holders be willing to swear to uphold the Constitution “as a means of ensuring loyalty to the nation” (1939e, 7). Most found such stipulations uncontroversial. Why should the creation of a rigorous examination and licensure process for political leaders be any different?
In making this appeal, Lasswell (Reference Lasswell1939e, 6) hoped to reassure listeners that the purpose of a vetting system for social doctors was not to “restric[t] the practice of politics to men and women who were born with silver spoons in their mouth.” In “[o]ur American democracy,” anyone who wished to contribute to the public good ought to be given the chance to do so, “regardless of the wealth of his parents” (3, 6). But extending the opportunity to practice politics to everyone need not mean that we allow anyone to actually do so. Once again drawing a parallel to medicine, he noted that while it was democratic to permit every individual to train to become a physician, it was “not democratic to put up with quacks” (6). In the same sense, the opportunity to train to become a physician of the people should be open to all. Yet just as we do not allow individuals to be treated by doctors who failed their medical exams, we ought not to permit those who failed to demonstrate the requisite capacities to serve in positions of political leadership.
Admittedly, Lasswell (Reference Lasswell1939e, 9) said, extensive consideration would be needed to determine the precise forms of knowledge social doctors ought to possess before they were allowed to minister to the public. Fortunately, however, practical questions such as these need not be solved in advance. Even in modern medicine there was “no complete agreement on the kind of training that produces the best private physicians,” since “existing standards of admission to the practice of medicine” were continually reviewed and modified in light of new research. Hence while social doctors would surely need training in certain foundational subjects, including history, civics, and, of course, psychiatry, the specific content of their education could be defined and refined over time “by testing experience” (9).
With this, Lasswell brought his two-week discussion of social doctors to a close, and, in the remaining episodes of HNA’s first season, he turned his attention to more specific manifestations of destructive personalities (e.g., the bad boss, the incipient dictator, the political reactionary). Yet the remarkable vision he had introduced in the first half of the season continued to inform these later installments. Indeed, surveying the tumultuous state of the world in the season’s final episode, he impressed upon his listeners that “the men who hold positions of power in our major political parties or in our government” exercised real power over the “life and death [of] thousands of American soldiers and civilians.” To avoid catastrophe, citizens therefore needed more effective means of taming their own irrational impulses, as well as institutionalized mechanisms to bind their leaders to more robust “standards of competence” (Lasswell Reference Lasswell1939e, 6).
Such remarks make clear that Lasswell never regarded HNA as a trivial or dispassionate experiment with no intended political effects. As he affirmed in his own analysis of the show, written shortly after its conclusion, HNA was designed to contribute to the “socially significant” goal of collective “insecurity reduction” during a period of intense “social difficulty” in the US (Lasswell Reference Lasswell1941b, 55, 50; emphasis in original). In other words, its goal was to render listeners “less tense, less worried and irritable, less compulsive in their attitude toward themselves and their world,” and, as a result, less inclined to pursue “reactionary” or “revolutionary” behaviors (56). Ultimately, Lasswell hoped this would nurture a more “balanced type” of citizen—what he referred to a “Type C” personality, in contrast to a “Type A” (reactionary) or “Type B” (revolutionary) personality—to help stabilize American life at a time when the country’s social, political, and economic order appeared acutely vulnerable (52). He even predicted that, with further experimentation, it would become possible to devise “general program standards” in support of this work, which could be infused not just into a single radio show but also into “every agency of mass communication” (64).Footnote 19
Such a project, designed as it was to steer listeners toward forms of political conduct Lasswell deemed salutary and away from those he regarded as unhealthy, raises difficult questions about how he understood democracy and its compatibility with propaganda and expert management, particularly during this period of his career. Among Lasswell scholars, these questions are not new. They are perhaps especially pertinent in the case of HNA, however, given that, unlike much of Lasswell’s academic scholarship, the show was a prescriptive political project explicitly designed for mass consumption. As is so often the case, sorting through them requires careful attention to definitions and context.
With respect to HNA’s status as a propaganda object, for instance, it seems clear that NBC and Lasswell had differing understandings of the phrase. As the deliberations within NBC demonstrate, company executives spoke of propaganda in relatively colloquial terms: biased political messaging hidden beneath an entertaining or otherwise apolitical veneer so as to manipulate audiences without their conscious awareness. HNA was not this, precisely. Certainly, the program was designed to achieve a specific political function, that of “train[ing]” listeners to “recognize personality conditions” that might prod them to engage in “reactionary” or “revolutionary” behavior, and to seek “expert assistance” to assuage those conditions before a “destructive breakdown took place” (Lasswell Reference Lasswell1941b, 56, 53).Footnote 20 By “nourish[ing] and sustain[ing] the progressive adjustment of an individualistic society,” HNA aimed to prevent political extremism at a time when America’s social and political norms were under immense strain. Lasswell did not try to hide this goal from his listeners. Unlike Bernays’s proposal to “sell patriotism,” HNA explicitly stated that political agitation and revolutionary ferment were the product of irrational impulses.
Yet if Lasswell did not bury HNA’s messages behind a misleading front, he did not regard it as an apolitical form of mass communication either. According to his own technical definition, propaganda constituted “the management of collective attitudes by the manipulation of significant symbols” (Lasswell Reference Lasswell1927, 627) Elsewhere, he described it as an “act of advocacy in mass communication” that holds “a direct bearing on public policy” (Lasswell Reference Lasswell1950, 284). On this account, HNA clearly did function as propaganda. As an “act of advocacy in mass communication,” the show sought to manage “collective attitudes” with the purpose of directing listeners toward certain political behaviors and away from others. But did this make it antidemocratic? Here, again, things are complicated.
Critical interpreters of Lasswell’s work have often argued that his interest in propaganda and his skepticism of the intellectual capacity of the masses led him to develop a “sanitized conception of democratic politics” in which an “elite-controlled policy process” often “overrule[d] the desires and aspirations of ordinary people” (Dryzek Reference Dryzek1989, 98; Merelman Reference Merelman1981, 473).Footnote 21 Others have challenged this view, claiming that Lasswell abandoned his manipulative tendencies in a dramatic democratic turn in the 1940s, or perhaps even harbored a “latent” commitment to democracy throughout his career (Brunner Reference Brunner2008; Easton Reference Easton1950; B. Smith Reference Smith and Rogow1969; Torgerson Reference Torgerson2024). I cannot fully adjudicate these claims here. Insofar as they bear on HNA, however—a program that hoped to cure the ills of American democracy through recourse to licensed specialists—it is worth emphasizing that Lasswell’s own conceptualization of democracy at times rendered it perfectly compatible with propaganda and expert management. Indeed, with respect to HNA the pertinent question is not whether Lasswell understood the show to be in the service of democracy; he surely did. It is whether (or to what extent) readers agree with his broader contention that democracy sometimes requires tending from above, particularly in those cases when the demos is judged by social, political, or medical experts to be unable or unwilling to properly “adjust” itself to the “needs of the time.”
Lasswell ([1947] Reference Lasswell1999, 121) offered varying characterizations of democracy over his career, but he most often associated it with the pursuit and protection of “human dignity.” Thus in the 1930s he spoke of democracy as the equitable distribution of core values like “deference, safety, and income” (Lasswell Reference Lasswell1936, 25). Later he defined it as a “commonwealth where … specific values as power, respect, and knowledge are widely shared and are not concentrated in the hands of a single group, class, or institution” (Lasswell and McDougal Reference Lasswell and McDougal1943, 212). In Democracy through Public Opinion, one of Lasswell’s (Reference Lasswell1941a, 1) most full-throated defenses of popular government, he maintained that “majority rule” was necessary to any democracy since it ensured “the capacity of every individual to contribute to the common life.” At the same time, however, he emphasized that democracy was not coextensive with majority rule, since majorities could “be inconsiderate of the thoughts and feelings of others” (2). To safeguard human dignity for all, democracy required an educated and enlightened citizenry, or a public opinion “capable of sustaining democracy.” The key features of such an opinion were that it remain “loyal to the goals of democracy and perspicacious about the means necessary for their attainment,” that it “follow the advice of wise leaders,” and that it “elect the right men to office” (16).
Nothing in these characterizations was necessarily opposed to popular government, and Lasswell obviously took himself to be advocating for democracy in stipulating them. Yet insofar as the pursuit of human dignity required an “enlightened and responsible attitude” among the general citizenry, it followed that expert education, management, and even manipulation may be required in cases when that attitude was found wanting (Lasswell Reference Lasswell1962, 117). This was why he found it uncontroversial to claim that “democracy must make propaganda in favor of itself and against propaganda hostile to itself” (Lasswell Reference Lasswell1941a, 98), or that “sound policy dictates the timely use of skillful propaganda for the purpose of organizing necessary changes in faulty routines of institutional life,” to which “the masses can contribute acquiescence” (Lasswell Reference Lasswell1939a, 274). Lasswell, then, was certainly a democrat. But he also believed that the masses sometimes required expert training to live up to his vision of this form of government.
This belief was articulated most strongly in Lasswell’s work in the 1930s, which, given his interest in Freudianism during these years, is perhaps unsurprising. For instance, David Easton (Reference Easton1950, 465), one of the earliest and strongest defenders of Lasswell’s democratic bona fides, noted that Lasswell’s engagements with psychoanalysis in this period supported an “elitist conceptual framework,” since psychoanalysis “cannot but help suggest the desirable orientation within the reality” and restructure the analysand “in terms of the analyst’s system of values.” Hence even if Lasswell had the best of democratic intentions, Easton acknowledged that his transposition of psychoanalysis “from the individual matrix … to society as a whole” rendered his work amenable to expert manipulation of the masses. For where it is “desirable that the aims of personality adjustment be set by the few psychoanalysts, it becomes a fact in elitism that the few dominate the many” (465).
In subsequent decades, Lasswell did offer more explicit commitments to participatory democracy than in his earlier scholarship, even if those commitments sometimes continued to sit alongside a belief in the value of “the management of collective attitudes by the manipulation of significant symbols” (Lasswell Reference Lasswell1950, 284). Thus did he write in the second edition of Psychopathology, published in 1960, that he remained dedicated to the “deliberative manipulative intervention” outlined in that book, since applying such techniques “to every social interaction during every twenty-four hours of life from birth to death” would “make it possible for human beings to develop into adult personalities whose unconscious processes support rather than frustrate the achievement of a mature level of democratic participation” (Lasswell [1930] Reference Lasswell1960, 307, 311). By the late 1960s, though, he appeared to develop a more significant reconsideration of psychoanalysis. In a coauthored study of a power-sharing arrangement at the Yale Psychiatric Institute (YPI), Lasswell questioned the suitability of “the traditional medical model” of psychiatry and lauded the institute’s transformation from an “authoritarian hospital into a therapeutic community in which power is genuinely shared” (Rubenstein and Lasswell Reference Rubenstein and Lasswell1966, 275, 286). Even here, though, expert management was not entirely dismissed. For example, Lasswell noted that the YPI’s approach was successful as a strategy of “guided democratization” in which the hospital director “vigorously retained ultimate authority” (280–81). He even claimed that the YPI experiment might be scaled to society at large via the medium of television. In this vision, “top leadership” could use “direct-contact media” to “propagate doctrines of modernization and democratization and control the tempo of change toward more active and inclusively oriented participation” (282). In this sense, the YPI study represented perhaps Lasswell’s most radical acknowledgment that democracy required a meaningful degree of power sharing within a community, even if he maintained some commitment to the idea that a well-regulated polity required expert ministration.
As with all his work, therefore, Lasswell never intended HNA to conspire against democracy; quite the contrary. Yet the central question the program raised was how (or how well) manipulative messaging could coexist with other core values Lasswell associated with democracy, especially human dignity and popular rule. In its attempt to reinforce his vision of this concept at a time of profound social instability, HNA encapsulated enduring tensions in Lasswell’s work between democracy and elitism—tensions that remain as difficult to resolve in our own time as they were in his.
Toward a New Politics of Anxiety
Today, HNA is remembered—if it is remembered at all—as little more than a blip in the career of an American political scientist who has too often been shunted to the margins of contemporary disciplinary discourse. Yet the basic themes of Lasswell’s show appear more pertinent now than ever, given the parallels between many of the defining problems of our own age and those of the late 1930s. Now, as then, a series of protracted economic crises has spawned growing disaffection and resentment among large swaths of the American electorate. Now, as then, nativist and demagogic leaders have exploited this disaffection and resentment for their own ends without addressing the inequalities fueling them. Now, as then, this domestic turmoil has played out against the backdrop of increasing isolationism and great-power conflict abroad. And now, as then, these problems appear to be exacerbated by new forms of mass communication that seek to manipulate public opinion via relentless corporate messaging, fake news, and political propaganda. In light of these historical resonances, it is perhaps unsurprising that many popular commentators today have turned to psychopathological terminology, just as Lasswell did over 80 years ago.
Much of this discourse has come from those who, like Lasswell before them, have sought to defend existing institutions of liberal democracy. In a recent essay for the New York Times, for instance, columnist Thomas B. Edsall (Reference Edsall2023) contended that mitigating the increasing levels of polarization in American politics required policy makers to come to grips with its underlying psychological drivers. Drawing on the research of cultural psychologist Michele J. Gelfand, Edsall explained that residents of Republican-voting states favored “tight” or conservative social policies because these states have tended to exhibit high rates of hazard, and “[w]hen people perceive threat—whether real or imagined, they want strong rules and autocratic leaders to help them survive.” Given that Democratic-voting states have comparatively lower rates of such hazards, or their inhabitants at least perceive them to be less prevalent, residents of these states have felt they can afford to adopt “looser” or more permissive attitudes. Deploying language Lasswell might have used a century prior, Edsall concluded that relying on increased scientific knowledge of the human mind was likely to generate “more effective ways to manage” political partisanship, that “most dangerous of human predispositions.”Footnote 22
Other commentators have echoed Edsall’s depiction of American psychopathological dysfunction, but have advanced an inverse account of its relationship to politics. Hence in her own New York Times essay, anthropologist and historian of science Danielle Carr (Reference Carr2022) argued that the explosion in diagnoses of depression and anxiety among the US populace is the direct result of a political system that imposes intolerable stressors on its lower- and middle-class citizens by providing inadequate or inequitable access to essential standards of living such as “housing, food security, education, child care, job security, the right to organize for more humane workplaces and substantive action on the imminent climate apocalypse.” As such, any effort to alleviate rising rates of depression and anxiety in the US would have to involve more than just “slinging medications” or “rebranding … a national suicide hotline.” Such tactics were hopeless, Carr maintained, because they treated Americans’ psychological distress as a collection of individual pathologies rather than as “an expression of the fact that growing numbers are becoming convinced that the current state of affairs gives them no reason to hope for a life they’d want to live” (Carr Reference Carr2022). To truly solve its mental health crisis, then, the US needed not therapy, but revolution—or at least something approaching it.Footnote 23
At first glance, the emergence of such neo-Marxist analyses in popular political discourse seems opposed to Lasswell’s approach to mental health in HNA and its echoes in the work of contemporary epigones like Edsall.Footnote 24 For while Lasswell (Reference Lasswell1941b, 54) would certainly agree that policy makers ought to mitigate external conditions that might prod citizens’ destructive impulses “into concentrated life,” the primary goal of HNA was to encourage Americans to seek individualized medical treatment for conditions like anxiety and depression before they could be expressed in the public sphere as political grievance. Yet if we accept Carr’s argument that sociopolitical conditions are the primary driver of citizens’ mental insecurities, then it seems that a more democratic treatment regimen would not be to adjust individuals to their insecurities but to transform the very policies, systems, and institutions underlying them. Thus her contention that “[w]hen it comes to mental health, the best treatment for the biological conditions underlying many symptoms might be ensuring that more people can live less stressful lives” (Carr Reference Carr2022).
At a conceptual level, however, the challenge this argument poses to Lasswell’s project of preventive politics in HNA is not as total as it might initially appear. This is not only because, as discussed above, later in his career Lasswell expressed views that were more amenable to radical democratic ends. It is also because, whatever the differences between Carr’s views and those Lasswell outlined in HNA, both treat conditions like anxiety and depression in fundamentally similar terms, as psychopathologies. That is, both regard mental insecurity as a problem to be solved, a domain of experience incompatible with “healthy” forms of political life. To some degree, this goal is surely laudable. Indeed, in emphasizing the conceptual ground shared by these two apparently oppositional cures for Americans’ collective psychopathologies, I do not mean to suggest that mental illnesses do not exist, or that they ought not be recognized as genuine sources of human suffering with far-reaching impacts; the opposite is true (American Psychological Association 2023). What I am suggesting, however, is that confining public discussion of the political significance of mental health to the realm of the psychopathological risks obscuring alternative interpretations of these experiences, ones that interpret their significance to democratic life differently from the medicalizing models developed by HNA and rearticulated in much contemporary political discourse on both the Left and the Right.
Consider, as one potential resource for developing such possibilities, the existential psychologist Rollo May’s own account of mental insecurity, The Meaning of Anxiety, originally published in 1950. May is certainly not the only figure one might turn to in order to develop an alternative conceptualization of political psychiatry.Footnote 25 I draw on him here, however, both because he was a contemporary of Lasswell and because Meaning of Anxiety was a popular work in its own time, and thus represents a similarly accessible vision of the politics of mental insecurity compared to the one outlined in HNA.
In this book, May contended that psychiatry’s tendency to regard all experiences of anxiety “as indicators of psychopathology” was limited, since it overlooked the ways in which such experiences might be indicative of one’s confrontation with agentive possibilities that were, in some sense, indispensable conditions of life itself. Drawing as much on philosophers like Søren Kierkegaard and Baruch Spinoza as psychologists like Sigmund Freud and Harry Stack Sullivan, he argued that some degree of uncertainty was “essential to the human condition” insofar as the unfoldment of one’s self was an irreducibly contingent undertaking (May [1950] Reference May1977, xxi). In May’s view, living was a process in which the individual was continually confronted with conditions that presented threats to “our existence or values that we identify with our existence” (329). The nature of these threats “varied infinitely,” including those to “physical life,” to “psychological existence (the loss of freedom, meaninglessness),” or to “some other value which one identifies with one’s existence (patriotism, the love of another person, ‘success,’ etc.)” (330, 180). Apprehension thus manifested in all manner of experiences that involved radical transformation or existential instability—the child learning to walk, the adult falling in love, the citizen protesting a loss of rights, the cancer patient facing the prospect of death. But the sheer diversity of anxiety’s presentation in human life was also precisely the point: it was a constitutive feature of finite existence in a world of infinite (and therefore potentially threatening) potential.
At its core, therefore, mental insecurity was nothing other than the feeling produced by conflicts between “our expectations and reality,” the ultimate origins of which were to be found in our ongoing, omnipresent negotiation between “being and nonbeing,” or “between existence and that which threatens it” (May [1950] Reference May1977, 317). As such, it was only in the “courageous and constructive working through of this anxiety connected with the threat of dissolution” that the very “experience of being a self” could be materialized, since this experience implied an awareness of one’s incipient potentialities as well as their potential frustration (183). Hence while the widely popularized notion of mental health as “living without anxiety” had an “invaluable ideal meaning,” May also warned that when it was “oversimplified … to mean that the goal in all life is a total absence of anxiety, the judgment becomes delusive and even dangerous” (340; emphasis in original).
Of course, May did not argue that all experiences of insecurity were “good,” or that individuals could simply master their anxieties by becoming stronger, better, or more responsible individuals. Unlike libertarian critics of psychology like Thomas Szasz, he recognized the existence of neurotic forms of anxiety in which the individual’s capacity to engage with or acknowledge some threatening event was avoided, postponed, or otherwise blocked.Footnote 26 Following conventional psychotherapeutic wisdom, this could be the result of intrapsychic processes such as repression. However, consistent with the observations of other antipsychiatrists, he also noted that it could be the product of social or political conditions (May [1950] Reference May1977, 212). And yet, for May, addressing the political, cultural, or economic sources of individual insecurity was not the same as pursuing a social order that sought to eliminate anxiety, or even reduce it to a minimum.
Existentially speaking, such a goal was hardly possible, since a life free from anxiety would be by definition a life absent transformative possibility. Politically speaking, though, it was also dangerous. For if anxiety was a condition of possibility of human agency, then seeking to construct a world in which such experiences were understood primarily as “indicators of psychopathology” risked exacerbating neurotic anxiety, since individuals would be confronted with irresolvable conflicts between the conditions of reality and cultural norms of idealized selfhood (May [1950] Reference May1977, 354, 340). Such an approach would also inhibit the development of political institutions and languages that provide a means by which individuals could consciously acknowledge and collectively address insecurity as the necessary condition of living a finite, vulnerable existence in a radically contingent world. To the extent that a term like political “health” is an apt one for May, therefore, it would imply not the absence of insecurity—a society in which citizens’ stresses and uncertainties have been finally resolved—but the capacities of a public to “confront anxiety and move ahead despite it” (34; emphasis in original).
Such a perspective suggests that rereading Lasswell’s radio program in our contemporary era yields multiple lessons. In one sense, recovering Lasswell’s mission in HNA helps us to identify the degree to which his work helped to propagate a conceptualization of anxiety as a political danger to democracy that requires expert mitigation and management—a conceptualization that remains influential today. But we might take the analysis further. Following figures like May, we might ask not just whether it is possible to achieve Lasswell’s vision of a “politics without anxiety,” but also, and more fundamentally, whether we might nurture new public languages for speaking about the relationship between politics and anxiety. That is, what resources emerge if we conceptualize democracy not merely as a politics that lives in fear of anxiety, but also as a politics of anxiety in some meaningful sense? What forms of civic engagement become possible if popular political commentary were to speak of insecurity not simply as a disease to be cured, but also, in certain manifestations, as a call for collective reflection and experimental growth?
Imagining the means by which such alternative discourses of political psychology could be further developed and disseminated remains a task for future work, to be undertaken in dialogue with recent scholarship advocating for what I take to be broadly similar aims.Footnote 27 No matter what form such a discourse might take, however, what is clear is that it would neither seek to medicalize Americans’ insecurities nor promise a political future absent insecurity as such. Rather, it would constitute a publicly available language through which individuals might process anxiety and attendant experiences such as doubt, vulnerability, or fear, not merely as menacing political pathologies but also as conditions of possibility for (collective) self-realization.
