An explosive, deeply revisionist work that reveals how a renegade English Duke and Thomas Paine, the firebrand polemicist, almost brought the American Revolution to Britain.

When Danielle Allen discovered a parchment of the Declaration of Independence buried away in Sussex, England, little did she know that she had stumbled onto a larger story that fundamentally changes our understanding of eighteenth-century British and American history. Demonstrating in Radical Duke that the Age of Revolution began neither with Boston patriots nor with Parisian Jacobins, Allen shows how Charles Lennox, the progressive Third Duke of Richmond, along with radical pamphleteer Thomas Paine secretly fomented a political revolution in which they supported their rebelling American brethren, led the first proposals for universal manhood suffrage, and argued for freedom of the press and religious toleration. Identifying for the first time the anonymous authors of Britain's seditious Junius letters and revealing that Paine cowrote The Juryman's Touchstone of 1771, Radical Duke sets the historical record straight, conjoining radical thought in America and Britain and revealing the complex foundation of modern constitutional monarchy and our own age.

Danielle Allen is the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University and author of Justice by Means of Democracy, Cuz, and Our Declaration, winner of the Parkman Prize. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the American Academy of Sciences and Letters, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

(recorded 6/9/2026)