Christopher J. Berry

Christopher J. Berry is Professor Emeritus of Political Theory and Honorary Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow.

While not technically an intellectual historian, Berry’s scholarship has been rooted in discussion of changing historical usages of political concepts and resulted in significant contributions to the study of the history of political thought. In the past few decades, he has directed his attention principally to writing about the Scottish Enlightenment’s social and economic theory. In this interview, we talk through his major publications including The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation (CUP, 1994) and The Idea of Commercial Society in the Scottish Enlightenment (EUP, 2013).