Hanna Fenichel Pitkin

Hanna Fenichel Pitkin (born July 17, 1931) is a political theorist. She is a Professor Emerita 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. She received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1961. In 1982, she was granted the Distinguished Teaching Award from UC Berkeley.

Pitkin's diverse interests range 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 are 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 are collected and thematized in Hanna Fenichel Pitkin: Politics, Justice, Action (2016).

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 Dan Avnon (Hebrew University, Jerusalem), Lisa Wedeen (University of Chicago), and Mary G. Dietz (Northwestern University).