Hanna Fenichel Pitkin

Hanna Fenichel Pitkin's political theorizing confronts the sense of powerlessness and alienation that marks the modern condition. It does so by embracing plurality, ambiguity, and contradiction, and by remaining attuned to embodiment, needs, and differences -aspects of the human condition that political theorists have, she argues, too often sought to escape or deny. The insights generated by Pitkin's theorizing not only point to the challenges we face in marshalling our deliberative and shared powers, but also makes accessible to us conceptual and practical tools we can use to address our troubling times. The editor has focused on work in three key areas: Politics: Pitkin's work on the problems of autonomy, moral action, consent, and obligation examines in nuanced ways how persons relate to political collectivities.^ She explores our tendency to imagine autonomy in ways that deny our interconnectedness and instead project dominance over others, and she limns alternatives to these immature and masculinist conceptions of agency. Drawing out these themes in her readings of literature and classics of political theory, Pitkin illuminates problems of political agency in late modern life. Judgement: Pitkin's path-breaking work with language philosophy is most prominently displayed in her work on justice. In selections from this work and others, Pitkin brings together questions of responsibility, the insights of moral philosophy, and even pedagogical practice. Blending ordinary language philosophy and textual study, she offers a complex and subtle set of observations about justice and judgement which open to questions of action and responsibility in the exercise of political freedom.^ Action: Pitkin's political thinking draws out images of political action that best heed the ambiguities and complexities of co-action with strangers. Pitkin's work in these selections reflects upon the ways that people co-create complex, large-scale problems by way of their participation in social norms, their attribution of agency to "the market", the problem of false necessity, and so on. She diagnoses these problems as a reflection of our alienation from our own shared and collective powers, and offers suggestions for their redirection.