Professor Danielle Allen

The 40th HLA Hart Memorial Lecture was held on 22 May in the College Chapel. This year’s lecture, part of the series funded by the Tanner Lectures on Human Values, was titled “The Radical Duke: Universal Suffrage and the Modernization of Constitutional Monarchy” and was delivered by Professor Danielle Allen, the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University.

In an engaging and illuminating talk, Professor Allen shared her research on the “Radical Duke,” Charles Lennox, 3rd Duke of Richmond, who introduced a bill for universal manhood suffrage in the House of Lords in June 1780. The bill emerged from a philosophical and practical effort to solve a constitutional puzzle created in Britain by the growing work of colonial administration and the pressures of the American Revolution.

The story of how Richmond, a close collaborator of Edmund Burke and radicals like Thomas Paine in the 1760s and 1770s, developed this proposal is an essentially unknown but important part of British constitutional history and the history of theory and practice of representation. Richmond achieved the technical innovations needed to make modern representation possible. During the lecture, Professor Allen introduced these important contributions and unpacked their significance for constitutional theory for the audience.

You can view a recording of the lecture below:

Published: 28 May 2026

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