Hanna Fenichel Pitkin

Hanna Fenichel Pitkin (July 17, 1931 – May 6, 2023) was an American political theorist.

Pitkin was born on July 17, 1931.

She was a professor emeritus of political science at the University of California, Berkeley.

Daughter of Otto Fenichel, Pitkin was born in Berlin and emigrated to the United States in 1938; her family had fled Nazi Germany for Oslo and Prague in the interim.

She received her Doctor of Philosophy degree from UC Berkeley in 1961.

She was best known for her seminal study The Concept of Representation, published in 1967.

Pitkin's diverse interests ranged from the history of European political thought from ancient to modern times, through ordinary language philosophy and textual analysis, to issues of psychoanalysis and gender in political and social theory.

Pitkin's books were The Concept of Representation (1967), Wittgenstein and Justice (1972, 1984, 1992), and Fortune Is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolò Machiavelli (1984, 1999), in addition to numerous articles and edited volumes.

In 1982, she was granted the Distinguished Teaching Award from UC Berkeley.

Pitkin died on May 6, 2023, at the age of 91.

In The Concept of Representation Pitkin described four types of representation: formalistic, descriptive, symbolic and substantive.

In 1998 she published The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt's Concept of "the Social".

In 2003, she was awarded the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science "for her groundbreaking theoretical work, predominantly on the problem of representation".

She was married to political theorist John Schaar.

Some of her students are noteworthy political scientists such as David Laitin (Stanford University), Dan Avnon (Hebrew University, Jerusalem), Lisa Wedeen (University of Chicago), and Mary G. Dietz (Northwestern University).

A wide selection of her writings is collected and thematized in Hanna Fenichel Pitkin: Politics, Justice, Action (2016).