Max Skjönsberg is Assistant Professor of Humanities in the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education. Before joining the Hamilton Center, 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, Catharine Macaulay, Paul de Rapin-Thoyras, Charles Francis Sheridan, and Michael Oakeshott on topics including political parties, the Enlightenment, press freedom and freedom of speech, political modernity, ancient constitutionalism and political representation.
His first book—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: Cambridge 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.
In 2021, he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Skjönsberg is currently writing a book about political reform and the “political nation” in the “long” eighteenth century (c. 1660—1832) for Princeton University Press.
