Max Skjönsberg is Associate Professor of Humanities in the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education. Before joining the Hamilton School, Max Skjönsberg was a Leverhulme EC Fellow at the University of Cambridge and a College Research Associate at Emmanuel College. Having lectured in Politics and History at the University of York and the University of St Andrews, he has also been a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Liverpool, and a David Hume Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh.
His work has focused on the history of political thought, especially on eighteenth-century political ideas. He has written about thinkers such as David Hume, Edmund Burke, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, Catharine Macaulay, Paul de Rapin-Thoyras, Charles Francis Sheridan, Friedrich von Gentz, William Blackstone, Henry Fielding, and Michael Oakeshott on topics including political parties, the Enlightenment, press freedom and freedom of speech, political modernity, constitutionalism, and political representation.
Skjönsberg’s latest monograph—The Spirit of the British Constitution: Parliamentary Reform from the Civil War to the Great Reform Act (Princeton University Press, 2026)—traces the history of parliamentary reform during the “long” eighteenth century (c.1660–1832).
His first monograph—The Persistence of Party: Ideas of Harmonious Discord in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2021)—treats the concept of political party in eighteenth-century political thought and practice, the time when parliamentary parties first emerged as stable features of politics. He is also the editor of Catharine Macaulay’s Political Writings (Cambridge University Press, 2023), and the co-editor of Hume’s Essays: A Critical Guide (Cambridge University Press, 2025) and Adam Ferguson’s Later Writings (Edinburgh University Press, 2023).
His articles have appeared in the Journal of the History of Ideas, English Historical Review, Historical Journal, History of Political Thought, Modern Intellectual History, History of European Ideas, Intellectual History Review, European Journal of Political Theory, Scandinavian Journal of History, and Parliamentary History. He regularly contributes to National Review and Engelsberg Ideas, and he is a contributing editor of Law & Liberty, part of the Liberty Fund Network.
In 2021, he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and he serves on the editorial board of Intellectual History Review, and the international advisory board of History of European Ideas.
