A Conversation with Hanna Pitkin

An interview with Hanna Pitkin took place at the University of California, Berkeley, in the spring of 2014. What follows is an edited transcript; a video of the entire interview can be found at www.annualreviews.org/r/hannapitkin. Prof. Pitkin is the author of books well known to scholars and students in political theory and political science: The Concept of Representation (1967), Wittgenstein and Justice (1972), Fortune is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Machiavelli (1984), and The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt's Concept of the Social (1998). Her influential articles include the two-part essay “Obligation and Consent” (1965). Hanna Pitkin is winner of the 2003 Skytte Prize in Political Science “for her groundbreaking theoretical work, predominantly on the problem of representation.” In this interview, she discusses with Prof. Nancy L. Rosenblum her work on representation, Machiavelli's republicanism and the study of gender, early conceptual analysis in political theory, political advocacy and organization, and the personal: her childhood and early influences, and the course of her academic career.