The Declaration of Independence Today: Why an Old Text Still Serves Us Now

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Danielle Allen is James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University. She is also Director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at the Harvard Kennedy School and Director of the Democratic Knowledge Project, a research lab focused on civic education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is a professor of political philosophy, ethics, and public policy as well as a seasoned nonprofit leader, democracy advocate, tech ethicist, distinguished author, and mom. She is a contributing columnist at The Atlantic Magazine, winner of the 2025 Barry Prize, and was the 2020 winner of the Library of Congress’ Kluge Prize, which recognizes scholarly achievement in the disciplines not covered by the Nobel Prize. She received the Prize “for her internationally recognized scholarship in political theory and her commitment to improving democratic practice and civics education.”

Across nearly three decades in higher ed, Danielle has worked to make the world better for young people. She won the Quantrell award for excellence in undergraduate teaching at the University of Chicago, where she also served as Dean of the Division of Humanities (2004-7); she chaired the board of the Mellon Foundation (2015-19), as that foundation expanded the range of institutions in which it invests; she wrote for the Washington Post from 2008-2024, with a column on constitutional democracy; and she has developed a public policy portfolio on issues from cannabis legalization and public health policy to democracy renovation, civic education, and sound governance of and with new technology. From 2015-2023, Danielle served as the Director of Harvard’s Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics, which launched its Intercollegiate Civil Disagreement Fellowship and Public Dialogue series during her tenure. During the height of COVID in 2020, Danielle’s leadership in rallying coalitions and building solutions resulted in the country’s first-ever Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience; her team’s policies were adopted in federal legislation and a presidential executive order; and, from 2020 to 2022, in response to the governance failures of the pandemic, Danielle ran for governor of Massachusetts, making history as the first Black woman ever to run for statewide office in Massachusetts. She is a lead author on the Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy (EAD), a framework for securing excellence in history and civic education for all learners, K-12, released in 2021, and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and U.S. Department of Education under both the Trump and the Biden administrations. She continues to serve on the EAD Implementation Consortium. Learning from the natural sciences, she has built labs to extend the impact of work in the humanities and social sciences. The non-profit organization that she founded, and for which she chairs the board, Partners In Democracy, continues to scale up civic education curricula and democracy renovation policies developed by her labs.

As a scholar, Danielle currently concentrates on democracy renovation: studying how to reconnect people to their civic power, experience, and responsibility via civic education and how to redesign our political institutions to improve their responsiveness, increase the accountability of officeholders, and reward the participation of ordinary citizens. Her most recent book, Justice by Means of Democracy, provides the foundation for this work. Her forthcoming book, The Radical Duke, a biography of an 18th century British political reformer, is due out with Liveright/Norton in 2026.

Her many books also include the widely acclaimed Our Declaration: a reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality; Cuz: The Life and Times of Michael A.; Democracy in the Time of Coronavirus, Talking to Strangers, Why Plato Wrote, and The World of Prometheus. Her many edited volumes include From Voice to Influence: understanding citizenship in a digital age and A Political Economy of Justice.

In addition to chairing the board of Partners In Democracy, Danielle chairs the board of FairVote, the nation’s leading advocate for ranked choice voting, and is a co-chair of the Our Common Purpose Commission at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, where she is a member. She also serves on the boards of the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education, Cambridge Health Alliance, and the Adams Presidential Center and is a past chair of the Mellon Foundation and Pulitzer Prize Board. She is also a member of the American Philosophical Society, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the American Academy of Sciences and Letters.

For more information on Danielle Allen please visit her on Twitter, her page at The Atlantic, and at scholar.harvard.edu/danielleallen/home.