This is a survey on harmonic analysis on real reductive Lie groups for the period 1950–1978. Contained is a description of the fundamental series of representations of a reductive group $G$, the theory of characters, a description of the Plancherel measure, a description of dual spaces with respect to the Fourier transform on $G$, the classification of irreducible representations of the group $G$, questions of harmonic analysis on symmetric spaces of noncompact type.