Hanna Fenichel Pitkin

Hanna Fenichel Pitkin was born to Jewish parents in Berlin, Germany. The family fled the Nazis in 1933 for Oslo, Norway, then Prague, Czechoslovakia, before immigrating to the USA in 1938, when Hanna was six years old. She received her PhD degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1961. After working at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she joined the political science faculty at UC Berkeley in 1966. She is best known for her seminal study The Concept of Representation, published in 1967. Her other books include 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 scholarly articles and edited volumes. A wide selection of her writings were collected in Hanna Fenichel Pitkin: Politics, Justice, Action (2016). In 1982, she received the Distinguished Teaching Award from UC Berkeley and in 2003, she was awarded the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science for groundbreaking theoretical work, predominantly on the problem of representation. She is currently professor emerita in Political Science. Prof. Pitkin was married to fellow political theorist John Schaar.