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I am a part of Hannah's remaining family in Germany; she was my great-aunt. Due to the long distance and time delay between us, it was often hard to stay in touch.

However, we were luckily able to visit Hannah twice in 2017 and 2019, for which I am very grateful. Because of the pandemic, we had to postpone our next visit to this fall, and therefore, it saddened us even more to hear about her sudden passing.
I think I can speak for all the members of my family when I say that the Hannah we got to know was one of the most, if not the most, independent, sharp, and strong-willed women of her age that I have ever met. I presume that she remained exactly like that until her very last day, which makes me very happy.

I remember that being only a 20-year-old undergraduate student, I sometimes pressured myself to articulate correctly in front of Hannah, given her outstanding academic achievements. Obviously, my worries were unjustified. On the contrary, she was always considerate and supportive when we talked. The conversations with her were just so delightful, and it was impressive how she could wrap up even the most intellectual topics with charming dry humor.

Among the few memories I had with Hannah personally, I fondly remember how we visited her home in Berkeley, and she showed us her beautiful little house. During the tour, my brother and I noticed her typewriter in her studio, and my brother started typing on it. Back then, he was relatively young, and it was clear that he did not know what this machine was, much less how to use it properly. When Hannah noticed what was going on, she was very amused and explained very patiently how the typewriter works. Now knowing that she was working on her latest publication, which she never got to finish, I cannot help but smile about her friendly and amused reaction to my clueless brother, despite him presumably making a mess on a page of her precious work that day.

With the passing of Hannah, we mourn the loss of a kind, interesting, and incredibly wise member of our family. And I am eternally grateful that, despite the long distance to Berkeley, I was able to meet Hannah in person.

Martin Drechsler,
Renate Drechsler,
Andreas Drechsler

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I found Hanna in 1996 by looking her up in the yellow pages in a public library in San Francisco- my father had told me about her many years before, saying she was his favorite cousin, from the nice side of his family. I called her and she invited me to out to dinner. I collected  her from her house- she was wearing a short blue skirt, and showed me her kitchen , that she had herself just finished painting blue. I had brought her a couple of blue bowls from a museum shop, and she was pleased. At dinner, looking at my plate, she said “you’re not very adventurous “. She invited me to visit her in Nevada, where she was going to spend the summer, but I was not adventurous enough..
In the last couple of years I came again from Israel to Berkeley on short visits and each time I called her and we went out to lunch together. She had aged and seemed physically fragile, but still was mentally sharp, her bright mind shining.
She told me of her last manuscript, on authority, knowing that she would leave it unfinished.
Learning of her death left me feeling so sad that she is no more.
יהיה זכרה ברוך
Elana Romik
Israel

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I was a student in Hanna's political theory graduate seminar in the mid-1970s, and  TA for history of political theory.  These were peak experiences of my years as a graduate student; I suppose Hanna was the finest example of what it was to be a teacher that I ever encountered.  The seminars were a model of deep dialogue with the texts and with one another (often followed by more discussion over beers at Kip's, a bit embarrassing for me because I was only 20 at the time.  Her lectures in the undergraduate class were deep and engaging, and I remember our long TA meetings, in which we would take such pride in collectively crafting the essay topics--that influenced the way I wrote exams for the rest of my career.  Hanna was an incredibly warm mentor too, giving such deep, supportive advice--no doubt influenced in some way by her psychoanalyst father.  She was a model too of keeping alive a connection between scholarship and citizenship, always passionate about what was going on in the world at the time and how it related to the ideas we were discussing.   Dan Hallin, Department of Communication, UC San Diego

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I was a student in Hanna's political theory graduate seminar in the mid-1970s, and  TA for history of political theory.  These were peak experiences of my years as a graduate student; I suppose Hanna was the finest example of what it was to be a teacher that I ever encountered.  The seminars were a model of deep dialogue with the texts and with one another (often followed by more discussion over beers at Kip's, a bit embarrassing for me because I was only 20 at the time.  Her lectures in the undergraduate class were deep and engaging, and I remember our long TA meetings, in which we would take such pride in collectively crafting the essay topics--that influenced the way I wrote exams for the rest of my career.  Hanna was an incredibly warm mentor too, giving such deep, supportive advice--no doubt influenced in some way by her psychoanalyst father.  She was a model too of keeping alive a connection between scholarship and citizenship, always passionate about what was going on in the world at the time and how it related to the ideas we were discussing.   Dan Hallin, Department of Communication, UC San Diego

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In the early 70s, I was a doctoral student in Wurster Hall’s Department of City and Regional Planning at Berkeley. I was interested in the micro-politics of planning, what sociologists would come to call practice studies. I had been reading phenomenology and ethnomethodology, the Frankfurt School, Austin and Wittgenstein too. In the midst of that doctoral work I hoped to enroll in Hanna’s year-long political theory seminar.

But so did many others. At the class’s first meeting, Hanna really thinned the ranks. Luckily for me, she asked students to leave by department: Anyone from sociology? Out. Anyone from education or social work? Out . . . and so on: it seemed that only political theory students would remain. At the end of that first class, though, I spoke to her in the hallway, as others were leaving. I said that she hadn’t yet thrown out the City Planning students — and that I’d been studying with Martin Krieger — at which point, in an unforgettable moment, her eyes widened, she smiled slowly, and she changed the course of my life as she said, “I’ve always wanted a student of Martin’s. You can stay.”

Nine months later, to bring the class to a close, we read and discussed one another’s papers. After writing about Wittgenstein and Austin, Cavell and Lukacs too, it had struck me very late in the game that virtually everything I’d read had been about the politics of representation and speech; nothing explored the everyday practice and politics of listening. So one day as I was finishing my seminar paper, prompted by the echoes of an Eddie Harris jazz track, I found a groove and added an appendix to the paper. I called it, “Listening: The Social Policy of Everyday Life.”

If the other students thought the body of my paper unexceptionable, they found that ‘listening piece,’ that appendix, eye-opening, engaging, intimate, resonant, provocative — and I was astonished. I had certainly never before written anything that someone else actually cared about, found powerful, even moving — how in the world had that happened?

A few months later, a friend — now an emeritus professor at NYU, Victor Rodwin — read that appendix and said, “This should be a book!”  But what else could I say that wasn’t in that fifteen page appendix?, I thought.

Twenty-five years later, as I published the Deliberative Practitioner with the M.I.T. Press, I realized that the whole book was a long footnote to that early ‘listening piece.’  Now, another twenty years later, I’m working on a small book — perhaps Listening As the Beginning of Kindness and Justice — that comes closer to what Victor might have had in mind.

But those books, and much of my other writing too, trace back directly to that “Pitkin paper’s appendix” and that seminar — and so my whole academic career, 45 years at Cornell University, has been indebted to Hanna’s taking a bet on me, “I’ve always wanted a student of Martin’s — you can stay.”

With many classmates, no doubt, I will always be grateful. Thank you, Hanna.

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I was in the first year of the PhD program, and I had the good/bad fortune of taking seminars with two of Berkeley’s finest and most demanding professors, Ernie Haas and Hanna Pitkin. One day I found myself rushing over from Prof. Haas’ lecture on Thomas Kuhn’s concept of scientific paradigms straight to office hours with Prof. Pitkin. With a sudden burst of inspiration, I made the rather rash move to pitch a paper idea to her on the fly. We could think of political theories as rival paradigms, I suggested, that compete on the basis of logical coherence, real-world relevance, etc. Needless to say, she gave me a bit of a dumfounded look. “What in the world makes you think that theories compete?,” she asked. “Theories are just theories. They just are.” I quickly realized that I had better look for another topic.

A seminar with Prof. Pitkin was a unique experience. She gently prodded us to explore different interpretations, to challenge them and defend them, and to examine the texts in greater and greater depth. Sometimes I was disappointed that she never gave us the answer code. She rarely even revealed her own interpretation. But I begrudgingly recognized that was the point. We were not seeking answers, just more enlightened states of uncertainty.

When I returned to Berkeley as a faculty member, I would run into Prof. Pitkin in the copy room from time to time. We would exchange a few words about my graduate student days, or about her latest seminar. One day I was able to report that my son’s first reading in his freshman seminar at college was none other than Pitkin’s The Concept of Representation. Lucky him.

Steven Vogel
Professor of Political Science and Political Economy

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In Fall 1963, I took the Intro to Political Theory course (PS 110) from Hanna Pitkin, and would like to relay the following incident, bizarre though it is. Hanna was lecturing on Plato’s Republic and had come to his critique of democracy. She was quoting the lines in which Socrates warns that in the hyper egalitarian setting of a democracy even the domestic animals, including dogs, behave as equals to the citizens. At just that moment a stray dog came wandering into the open door of the lecture hall (I believe it was in California Hall), made its way down the aisle to the front of the lecture hall and barked at Hanna. Then it turned around and left the room. Hanna was so overwhelmed with laughter that she couldn’t speak for several minutes. A truly amazing event of which I had the pleasure of reminding her many years later in Los Angeles. Ron Schmidt, Sr., B.A. 1965; M.A. 1966

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In Fall 1963, I took the Intro to Political Theory course (PS 110) from Hanna Pitkin, and would like to relay the following incident, bizarre though it is. Hanna was lecturing on Plato’s Republic and had come to his critique of democracy. She was quoting the lines in which Socrates warns that in the hyper egalitarian setting of a democracy even the domestic animals, including dogs, behave as equals to the citizens. At just that moment a stray dog came wandering into the open door of the lecture hall (I believe it was in California Hall), made its way down the aisle to the front of the lecture hall and barked at Hanna. Then it turned around and left the room. Hanna was so overwhelmed with laughter that she couldn’t speak for several minutes. A truly amazing event of which I had the pleasure of reminding her many years later in Los Angeles. Ron Schmidt, Sr., B.A. 1965; M.A. 1966

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Hanna was an exceptional teacher. I learned so much from her work, her teaching style, and her pages upon pages of handwritten feedback. I was also extremely fortunate to have learned from the conversations we had over the years. Two stand out in particular:

(1) When I first started out as a teaching assistant, I was only a couple years older than my students. I remember leaving her office and saying, “I have to go be authoritative now.” “You really ought to rethink your notion of authority,” she said. “It lies in your love of the material. If students see that you care about the text, they’ll respect you.”

It wasn’t so much a confidence booster, as it was a complete reorientation. Teaching wasn’t about proving your mastery of the material, but about introducing students to a discipline you know and love. That conversation fundamentally shaped how I approached teaching— it made it easier to focus on the texts and students’ learning.

(2) In my last year of graduate school, we met at Cafe Milano to talk about the dissertation. We began by talking about the work itself, but after a few minutes, she could tell how demoralized I was.

So she tried a new angle. It was time to finish, she said. I needed to stop making the diss “the big thing” in my life. At the heart of my self-beratement (“this isn’t good enough!”) was a deeply rooted voice of ambition (“I can do better”). This voice, she said, was my enemy.

She ended our conversation by telling me that I needed to be gentler with myself— to talk to myself the way I’d talk to a student that was asking for help. I might tell them things they didn’t want to hear, but I’d be kind. This was unexpected. For years, Hanna had provided pointed, critical feedback on my writing and ideas. But I think she recognized that what I needed in that moment was something different. “Isn’t it awful," she said, "the things we do to ourselves.”

Early on in graduate school, years before either these conversations took place, I remember sitting in her office. “I have these persistent questions,” I told her, as I read the New Yorker cartoons taped on her walls. “They won’t go away,” she replied. Had I only known then how many of these questions would be ones that she'd inspire. May her memory be a blessing.

Nina Hagel

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I met Hanna in my first year of graduate school, when several of us graduate students got permission to join an undergraduate class that she was teaching with Mike Rogin. The two of them generously made time to host a graduate level discussion section for us too. Hanna explained that the course was going to have a mommy and a daddy, and that we should know that she was going to be the daddy.

Hanna gave me a precious gift when I was struggling to finish my dissertation by sharing stories about times when she had been anxious and confused. As a PhD student, she told me, there were days that she could write and days that she could not write. On a good writing day, she would make herself write for as many hours as she could manage, but if it was a bad day, she would make herself stop. She advised me to write down all of my ideas, even when they did not seem to fit with my general outlines and plans. If I had random ideas, she explained, I should write them down on little scraps of paper and then put those scraps in my drawer. Then, when I was ready, I could go and open up that drawer, and my best and most original ideas would be there waiting, when I was ready for them. Of course, she meant a real drawer, and not the computer files and stacks of post-its that I tend to use, but the concept was a good one, and it made me wonder what her own drawer might look like.

Hanna also told me about some of the bad reviews that she received on her book manuscripts from anonymous reviewers, including one that was truly horrible and personally insulting. I remember her repeating the most devastating line a couple of times. At the time, I could not really fathom it– I had no idea that pettiness and gratuitous insults were so pervasive in academia and could not imagine that anything like that would trouble the professors that I admired. Later, I realized how important it was for me to hear stories like that, and how useful it would be for my students to hear stories like that from me.

The last time I saw Hanna was on a beautiful summer day, when we met for lunch with Dean in Santa Cruz. I was camping in Big Basin and I had made the plan in advance, but then realized that I was still too chicken to make the drive myself after a traumatic car crash that kept me off the highways for a long time. I called Hanna from a pay phone in the park and she came to my rescue and drove out to fetch me at a location not far from the park. I remember asking Hanna about her own work, while she tried to change the subject and talk about my book. She noted that there was one good chapter in my book, and that seemed to please her, so it pleased me too.

When I think of that memory, it feels like watching a video in fast forward, speeding by so rapidly that there is no way to hang on, to ask the right kinds of questions, or to say the right kinds of things. But still a beautiful one, and I treasure my memories of her mentorship and her presence. It feels like an honor to be able to share those memories, now that I am back in the classroom, and to see that my own students are very eager to hear about them.

Thank you for for creating this space, and to all that have shared your own tributes. I am still learning from my memories of Hanna, and love reading the memories that have been shared by other students.

--Bronwyn Leebaw, UC Riverside

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It is the first day of the academic year (think mid 70s) and I return again to listen to the first lecture on the history of Western Political Thought.  Wheeler was filled to capacity. Hanna at the front.  I wasn't there to take the class..I had advanced to candidacy.  But I wanted to get "juiced" listening to Hanna welcome her students into the tradition of political theory.

Hanna had invited us to "our own party," one that been going on after more than 2000 years.  The lines between host and guest became obscure with the idea that we were being welcomed into a tradition that is our own.  Receive the inheritance so important to our own self-knowledge, pass it on to posterity as a gift enlarged by our own labors, or ..."become little better than the flies of summer." (Edmund Burke).

I was writing my dissertation on Mary Wollstonecraft and Burke and had chosen Hanna as my advisor.  I chose her because she was tough.  She loved my ideas but said she had a hard time with my cryptic writing.  She vowed to help me.

Hanna was the only female professor in the Political Science Department when I began graduate school.   In addition to her incredible  intellect, she was an awesome role model.  The feminist movement was on.  Yet, with trepidation I had chosen to write about Wollstonecraft.  Hanna encouraged me to bring her into the fold of traditional Western political thought.  She encouraged me to "live" there too.

Her passing prompted me to read her comments in the margins of my papers.  She was direct and very kind.  I can hear her voice and see her gaze.  I am grateful to have had the opportunity in this life to have had her in it.

Karen Bowers (formerly Frick)
UC Berkeley, undergrad and graduate student
www.karenbowersstudio.com

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Hanna combined scrupulous attention to detail with a deeply ironic sense of humor. My dissertation relied on a Wittgensteinian approach to language policy in Somalia, for which Hanna was my co-chair. In my historical background, I addressed Somalia’s role in running a steamer service to supply Aden with provisions for its new role as a Red Sea port after the completion of the Suez Canal. Alas, a typo in my interminable draft chapter had it as “steamed service.” On the margin, Hanna wrote, “so they sent their laundry to Aden”. Fifty years later, that marginal comment still makes me giggle. David Laitin, Political Science, Stanford.

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I was introduced to Pitkin’s seminal work, The Concept of Representation, this past semester in Professor Thad Dunning’s Representation and Distribution Seminar, aptly held in the “Pitkin Room” (Social Sciences Building 749). Although the class itself was only an introduction to her work and the work it has spurred by others, Pitkin’s conceptualization of representation has set me toward a new direction in my undergraduate honors thesis topic.

Andrew Chen

UC Berkeley ‘24

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After starting my job at UCSC in 2003, I met Hanna for lunch in Santa Cruz on the first Tuesday of spring. We did it again the year after. As we were parting the second year, Hanna remarked that we had again met at 1 o'clock on the first Tuesday of spring. "Same time, same place next year?" she asked with a wide grin. "Of course," I replied. "You can count on it."

We exchanged little notes throughout that next year. Something I'd said about my Aristotle lectures had struck her as not quite right. Being not quite right was, of course, the best way to keep Hanna engaged in a conversation. Our lunch plan was never mentioned, so it was with real suspense that I showed up at the cafe at 1 o'clock on the first Tuesday of spring. Of course, there I found Hanna with an enormous grin of delight. We'd done it!

Hanna and I continued to lunch, without confirmation, at the same time and place nearly every first Tuesday of Spring until she moved full-time to Berkeley. Although our conversations didn't always flow, we each took great pleasure in being faithful to the ritual and dependable for each other in that small way.

Dean Mathiowetz
UCSC Politics

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Passing of Renowned Faculty member Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, 1931-2023 

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Passing of Renowned Faculty member Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, 1931-2023 

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Hanna Fenichel Pitkin died at her home on May 6, 2023. She was Professor Emerita of Political Science at UC Berkeley, a world-renowned political theorist and extraordinary teacher and mentor.

Pitkin was born in Berlin in 1931 to Jewish-German parents. Fleeing Nazi Germany first for Oslo and then Prague, the family emigrated to the United States in 1938, where they settled in Los Angeles. Pitkin moved between UCLA and UC Berkeley for both her undergraduate and graduate studies; she completed her Ph.D in Political Science at UC Berkeley in 1961. She taught at Berkeley, San Francisco State and the University of Wisconsin-Madison before returning to Berkeley in 1966 as its first female ladder rank faculty member. Pitkin formally retired in 1997 but continued to teach and mentor graduate students for another dozen years.

Professor Pitkin’s political theory interests and research ranged broadly, and included the history of European political thought, language philosophy, psychoanalysis, second wave feminist theory, and fiction. She rose to international prominence with her first book (based on her dissertation), The Concept of Representation (1967), a rigorous yet readable study of political representation which she divided into formal, symbolic, descriptive and substantive elements and also rendered as suffused with paradox. The book became influential across the field of political science and remains so today; in 2003, Pitkin was awarded the prestigious Johann Skyette Prize –sometimes called the “nobel” in Political Science—for the work. Her next book, Wittgenstein and Justice (1972) was also pathbreaking, as it brought the ordinary language philosophy of Wittgenstein to the study of political concepts. The practice she introduced and pursued in the book shaped a new approach to political theory and was influential for several generations of graduate scholars and students. In 1984, Pitkin brought a long-standing interest in psychoanalysis to close textual study in Fortune Is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the thought of Niccolo Machiavelli. And in 1998, she settled accounts with Hannah Arendt, a thinker who was equal parts important and trying for her.  The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of "the Social" is a sustained critical engagement with Arendt’s anti-Marxism and disparagement of society and the social in modernity. Professor Pitkin’s last and unfinished book was on the concept of authority. She worked on the manuscript until 2021. Pitkin never used a computer or a cell phone. She composed everything on a manual typewriter or longhand.

Professor Pitkin was a dedicated, accomplished and widely admired teacher of undergraduate and graduate students. She could be intimidating in the classroom not only because of her brilliance and acumen, but due to her willingness to tolerate long silences in seminars and her unflinching and copious critical commentary on written work. This effect, however, was balanced by her warmth, humor, and undying love of puns and play. Moreover, Pitkin understood better than most how powerful pedagogical authority could be, and she was measured and responsible in deploying it. She cared profoundly about the development of student capacities and was a devoted mentor, continuing to give advice to graduate students long into her retirement. She won UC Berkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 1982.

A wide selection of Professor Pitkin’s writings is collected in Hanna Fenichel Pitkin: Politics, Justice, Action (Routledge, 2016), edited by Dean Mathiowetz. The volume also features an introduction to her work by Mathiowetz and an interview he conducted with her. A 2014 interview with Harvard professor of political theory Nancy Rosenblum can be read or listened to here.

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We spoke only in passing when she visited the department.  In those moments, I will always remember her humor, her presence and her quiet smile.

Efrat Amanda Cidon
Undergraduate Adviser

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See the tribute to Hanna Pitkin on the Political Science Department's 150Women Page:

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See the tribute to Hanna Pitkin on the Political Science Department's 150Women Page:

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https://polisci.berkeley.edu/150w/hanna-pitkin

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Hanna Fenichel Pitkin is an American political theorist and Professor Emerita of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Born in Berlin and a resident of the United States since 1938, Hanna received her Doctor of Philosophy degree from U.C. Berkeley in 1961. After an appointment at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she joined the political science faculty at Berkeley in 1966. In 1982, she was granted the Distinguished Teaching Award from UC Berkeley. She is best known for her seminal study "The Concept of Representation," published in 1967.

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 political psychology and gender in political and social theory.

In 2003, she was awarded the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science, one of the most prestigious awards in the field, "for her groundbreaking theoretical work, predominantly on the problem of representation." Established in 1995 by the Johan Skytte Foundation at Uppsala University in Sweden, the prize is known by many as the "Nobel Prize in Political Science".

How has being at Berkeley influenced your work?

"I came to this country when I was six years old. Spending my adolescence in Los Angeles with its Hollywood influence, I thought that there was something wrong with me because I did not fit in. When I moved to Berkeley in the middle of my undergraduate studies, I discovered that there was not something wrong with me, there was something wrong with Los Angeles! Berkeley was very like Europe, more leftwing and intellectual as compared to the rest of America, and I felt much more at home."

"With my background and interests, this happens to be the best university in the world! I am very fortunate I got to teach here."

How has being a woman impacted your research and teaching?

"I am not sure whether to say - in every possible way, or not really!"

"I took it for granted that one could be a woman and do intellectual work, because of my upbringing - my mother did that as a matter of course, my parents took it for granted. I was the first woman faculty member in a ladder position in the Political Science Department at Berkeley, and I took considerable pride in doing well by the prevailing standards at the time. Initially, I did not address gender questions in my work. After federal legislation about affirmative action brought gender issues into the academy, I learned from my women students about their experience, and from some of my male colleagues, how they actually thought about women in academia. I went to department meetings and began to pay attention to gendered jokes and stories. And it did shake me up some. Even male professors who were less prejudiced thought that investing time and money on a woman candidate was wasteful because she would just get married and raise children. One of my woman students shared with me that it was very hard for her to talk in class because, at home, her parents were never interested in what she had to say, as they were in her brother's ideas. Remarks like that educated me."

"Years later, I was the only woman on an important university committee. The committee chairman drafted the committee's annual report mentioning our "serious efforts" on affirmative action. When I read the draft, I said I couldn't sign it, because I did not recall our making any particular efforts! They were fine, well-meaning people, but both they and I had a lot to learn about how gender functioned in the university."

What advice would you give to the next generation of women political scientists?

"What I would say would depend on the particular student, so this is hard to answer in general. I guess I would say: thinking, reading, writing and discussing ideas are such great pleasures! Enjoy yourself."

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Hanna Pitkin | UC Berkeley Political Science

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Hanna Fenichel Pitkin is an American political theorist and Professor Emerita of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Born in Berlin and a resident of the United States since 1938, Hanna received her Doctor of Philosophy degree from U.C. Berkeley in 1961. After an appointment…

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It may be of interest to colleagues to know that Hanna Pitkin’s undergraduate degree at UCLA was in mathematics. My source was Prof. Leo Bryman of Statistics, who was together with her in undergrad classes there.  He said that she never intended to make her career in math but she found the demands of majoring in it so untaxing that she could explore her other undergrad interests easily.  Somehow the thoughts that Hanna found math “untaxing” and that it speaks to the logical rigor of her work seem fitting.

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I was fortunate to be an undergraduate at Cal in the late 1960's and to take courses from Norman Jacobson, Mike Rogin, Hanna Pitkin, and John Schaar. When I was accepted to graduate studies at Berkeley, my focus was in Western Political Thought and the first of three theorists I mentioned above were my mentors, and oversaw my dissertation.

A mark of Hanna pedagogical skill was how she conducted our graduate classes. We were assigned reading, and when we met to discuss it, she would simply wait for us to begin the discussion, creating an uncomfortable pause until we took the responsibility--key word, responsibility to engage the subject and each other.

When she reviewed my Senior Honor's thesis on St. Augustine and the political, she focused on what needed to be addressed, not my successful analysis. She critiqued my writing until I felt all hope was lost for future studies. But when I wrote my dissertation, she never once focused on my writing. I learned and she taught.

My last meeting with her was in the Faculty Club for lunch to discuss Arendt's "On Revolution" and the chapter on "the pursuit of happiness".  I am grateful for having been one of her students, and for the lessons she taught me.

Nadesan Permaul
Political Science and Rhetoric
U.C. Berkeley