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.
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.
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).
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".[5] 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).