Max Skjönsberg

Max Skjönsberg is Professor at the Civitas Institute and a fellow in the Program on Humanities and the Western Tradition at the University of Texas at Austin.

Before joining the University of Texas at Austin, Max Skjönsberg was an Associate Professor of Humanities in the Hamilton School at the University of Florida, and before then, a Leverhulme EC Fellow at the University of Cambridge, and a College Research Associate at Emmanuel College. Having completed his PhD at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 2018, Professor Skjönsberg has also lectured in Politics and History at the University of York, the University of St Andrews, and the University of Liverpool. In 2018, he held the David Hume Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh.

Professor Skjönsberg’s 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, and Michael Oakeshott on topics including political parties, the Enlightenment, press freedom and freedom of speech, political modernity, political economy, ancient constitutionalism and political representation.

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. His second 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.

Professor Skjönsberg is 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, 2024) 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, Journal of British Studies, Scandinavian Journal of History, and Parliamentary History.

In 2021, he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.