Harold D. Lasswell was Ford Foundation Professor of Law and Social Sciences at Yale University. His influential work examined power relations, personality and politics, and behavioural political science and was published in more than 30 books and 250 articles. Lasswell studied philosophy and economics at the University of Chicago, graduating with a PhD in 1926. He then taught political science at the University of Chicago before working as director of war communications research at the Library of Congress during the Second World War. During this time, he analyzed Nazi propaganda to understand the mechanisms of persuasion used to garner German support. After the war, he took up his position at Yale, where he stayed until the 1970s. He was also a professor of law at John Jay College of the City University of New York and at Temple University. Lasswell was a visiting lecturer at campuses throughout the world and was a consultant to numerous U.S. government agencies. He studied power dynamics in Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (1936) and political psychology in Psychopathology and Politics (1930) and Power and Personality (1948). Over the course of his career, he served as president of the American Political Science Association (APSA), of the American Society of International Law and of the World Academy of Art and Science (WAAS). He died in 1978.