A Conversation with Hanna Pitkin

Hanna Pitkin, Professor Emerita of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, talks about her life and career with Nancy Rosenblum, Professor of Ethics and Politics in Government at Harvard University and Co-Editor of the Annual Review of Political Science. Dr. Pitkin discusses her childhood, growing up between two "Jewish intellectual left-wingers" who fled 1930s Germany to Oslo, Prague, and eventually Los Angeles. She describes how her refugee status and acquisition of new languages led her to become a scholar in political science. In 1967, she published "The Concept of Representation," which won the 2003 Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science "for her groundbreaking theoretical work, predominantly on the problem of representation." She went on to study other topics such as gender and politics in Machiavelli and Hannah Arendt's concept of "the Social."