Hanna Fenichel Pitkin

For her stepmother, the psychoanalyst, see Hanna Fenichel.

Hanna Fenichel Pitkin (July 17, 1931 – May 6, 2023) was an American political theorist. She was best known for her seminal study The Concept of Representation, published in 1967.

Hanna Fenichel Pitkin
Born	(1931-07-17)July 17, 1931 Berlin, Germany
Died	May 6, 2023(2023-05-06) (aged 91) Berkeley, California, U.S.
Spouse	John Schaar (died 2011)
Awards	Skytte Prize (2003)
Academic background
Education	University of California, Los Angeles University of California, Berkeley (MA, PhD)
Thesis	The Theory of Political Representation (1961)
Influences	Karl Marx, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell
Academic work
Discipline	Political science
Sub-discipline	Political theory
School or tradition	Berkeley school
Institutions	University of California, Berkeley (PhD)
Doctoral students	Mary G. Dietz David Laitin Lisa Wedeen
Notable works	The Concept of Representation (1967)
Influenced	Alice Crary

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.

Biography

Pitkin was born on July 17, 1931.^[1] 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.^[1] She received her Doctor of Philosophy degree from UC Berkeley in 1961.^{[citation needed]} In 1982, she was granted the Distinguished Teaching Award from UC Berkeley.^[2]

Pitkin died on May 6, 2023, at the age of 91.^[3]

Political representation

In The Concept of Representation Pitkin described four types of representation: formalistic, descriptive, symbolic and substantive.^[4]

Books

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 1998 she published The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt's Concept of "the Social". A wide selection of her writings is collected and thematized in Hanna Fenichel Pitkin: Politics, Justice, Action (2016).

• Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel (April 28, 2023). The Concept of Representation (1 ed.). University of California Press. doi:10.2307/jj.2711645. ISBN 978-0-520-34050-3.^[5][6][7]

Awards and legacy

In 2003, she was awarded the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science "for her groundbreaking theoretical work, predominantly on the problem of representation".^[8] 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).

See also

• Representation (politics)