SOME SUGGESTIONS ABOUT "INTERESTS" AND HISTORICAL MOTIVATION
What motivates historical action? Powerful biological and physical forces are at work in human behavior. Time passes and people grow up, grow old, and die. The constant need to recruit and replace within any human population is a powerful motivation for change. Bad harvests, inclement weather, poor soil, rich natural resources, these are geo-physical forces for change too. Then there are those cataclysmic events in which groups attack other groups, purges, domestic terrorism, civil and international wars. We discover countless instances of individual and group "irrationalism" in the history of human action. There are other forces that shape change, but the central and enduring principle of human mobilization is perceived interests.
Human interests, the pursuit of goals defined by individual and group interests. Physicists have their vast and impersonal force: gravity. Historians have an equally vast but intensely personal force: interests.
People are best assumed to do what they do, to think and believe what they do, to group together or split apart, to love or fight, because they think it is in their best interests to do so. It may not always be the case that a clear set of interests lie behind human behavior. We are nonetheless best advised to presume that humans think and act according to "perceived interests". Unless we have powerful and clear evidence to the contrary, we are safe to presume that humans act to protect or advance their interests. Perceptions in any given situation vary greatly among any large group of people, and some perceptions may be said to be irregular, irrational, or even wrong. Also, the results of human thought and action can be irregular, irrational and wrong in the extreme. But it is perilous to second-guess or trifle with the historical expression of perceived interests in the behavior of persons and groups. Over time, you cannot go wrong to assume that perceived interests motivate humans.
Influential American social scientist Harold Lasswell once ventured to list "the eight value categories" that "define the culminating outcomes (values) toward which and from which we perceive that events in the social process are moving". Lasswell presented the list and offered the above explanation in a 1958 postscript (p. 202) to Politics: Who Gets What, When, How. Here is the list, in an order of implied weight or significance:
 | Power |
| Wealth |
| Respect |
| Well Being |
| Rectitude |
| Skill |
| Enlightenment |
| Affection |
It may be that Lasswell first landed upon this supposedly comprehensive list in his Power and Society: A Framework for Political Inquiry (New Haven: 1950):55, written with Abraham Kaplan. Here the eight "values" were defined as the "goal-events of valuation". Curiously points seven and eight were reversed in this original formulation. Did Professor Lasswell later put more weight on enlightenment as a value, or lose faith in love?
Do we have to use social-scientific language like Lasswell’s in order to get to the heart of matters? We are after all talking about fellow human beings and not sub-nuclear particles. With due respect and gratitude, I would restate Lasswell’s contribution to our thinking in the following way.
Individuals and groups act in accordance with felt or conscious impulses which can be described by one or more of the eight "values" above. Furthermore, the goal or purpose of human action is to enhance one or more of the eight "values". In other words, when Lasswell used the phrases "toward which" and "from which" in the first quote, he combined goals (toward which) with motives (from which). And by calling goals and motives "values" he accented the subjective quality of those interests "from which" and "toward which" humans act. Perceived interests can be thought to combine variously these eight ingredients.
Notice that this discussion is about "perceived" interests. Are perceived interests always "real" interests? What are "real" interests? The answer to that surely depends on the nature of the person or group, and there is as great a variety of groups as there are perceptions of interests.
I would accent one final feature of this helpful list: it does not require us to presume that the concept "interests" includes only simple, greedy impulses. Both altruism and avarice find positions on this list. Sometimes our judgments of people derive from our sense of just how these eight ingredients combine in their behavior.