Dennis C. Rasmussen’s new book provides a portrait of the friendship that lay at the heart of the Scottish Enlightenment. The personal and intellectual connection between David Hume and Adam Smith is fascinating precisely because the founding father of economics and one of the greatest of philosophers are still widely read and retain their influence today. The Infidel and the Professor is a meticulously researched book that combines this knowledge with a lightly written narrative accessible to a non-academic audience. The book will also be of interest to Hume and Smith scholars as Rasmussen engages with the longstanding puzzles raised by Hume and Smith’s relationship and provides a considered discussion of the secondary literature in the extensive notes. The non-academic audience also benefit from the decision to reproduce Hume’s “My Own Life” and Smith’s “Letter to Strahan” as appendices. The fulsomeness of Smith’s eulogy for his friend in the “Letter” cannot be stressed enough. Smith wasn’t a man given to emotional displays, and as Rasmussen clearly shows, he was averse to controversy, yet he composed one of the most moving public celebrations of a life for a man who was widely attacked as an infidel. Hume’s reputation for irreligion, together with Smith’s far more (deliberately?) ambiguous views on the matter, forms the backdrop to Rasmussen’s narrative.
The book is structured chronologically with two opening chapters that outline the lives of the two friends prior to their first meeting which Rasmussen dates to 1749 (when Hume was 38 and Smith 26). Setting these two biographies side by side allows Rasmussen to indicate just how similar their upbringings were (p. 36–38): they came from broadly the same social background; passed through similar educational experiences; both lost their fathers early; both suffered mental crises brought on by excessive study; and both emerged with a sceptical attitude towards the power of reason. Hume had the more outgoing personality, but both were sociable and engaged public intellectuals who were at the heart of Scottish social life at the peak of the Enlightenment.
There then follows a chapter on each significant incident in their friendship, from the publication of Smith’s major works, to their time in France and London, to Hume’s dispute with Rousseau. Rasmussen provides a nice corrective to the earlier popularised account of the controversy in David Edmonds and John Eidinow’s Rousseau’s Dog: Two Great Thinkers at War in the Age of Enlightenment (2006), which went too far in excusing Rousseau’s behaviour in his dispute with Hume. Throughout, the details are based on letters between the pair, previous biographies, and analysis of their writings. The strength of Rasmussen’s book is its ability to show how Smith was both inspired by the thought of his friend, and how at the same time he reacted against it and modified some of Hume’s central ideas. The account is very much a tale of Smith following Hume, reacting to his views on issues such as the place of utility and justice in moral theory, the nature of sympathy, and the decline of feudal institutions. Rasmussen deftly indicates the depth of Hume’s influence on both The Theory of Moral Sentiments and, much less obviously, on the Wealth of Nations, but manages to avoid giving the impression that Smith’s thinking was derivative or unoriginal. This was a genuine exchange of ideas, but there is, at times, a slight risk of over emphasising the Humean nature of Smith’s thought. This is the nature of the beast and arises from the focus of the book on one relationship to the exclusion of other relationships and connections to the wider French and Scottish milieu in which their thought developed.
While this is understandable, given Hume’s position as the elder of the two and the fact that he had published extensively prior to their meeting, there is perhaps a slight missed opportunity in a book of this kind. Aside from an endnote abjuring speculation on Smith’s influence on Hume (p. 293), we find no speculation on how conversations between the two might have shaped Hume’s thinking, especially on the historical and economic issues he considered in publications following his meeting with Smith. Hume was fulsome in his praise of Smith’s published work and it is tempting to believe that they must have debated the main points of each other’s thinking on many occasions down the years.
Rasmussen’s account of the differences between Hume and Smith doesn’t detract from the deep, shared commitments that link the thought of the two Scots. It is a general methodology and a commitment to key shared principles that Rasmussen believes characterises their contribution to shaping modern thought: this includes their shared scepticism about the power of reason; their mutual commitment to the creation of a social science grounded on empirical evidence that leads to their shared interest in history; their stress on the emotions, on habit and custom as the principle explanation for the development of moral beliefs; and their appreciation of the unintended and evolutionary character of social life that have continued to shape our thinking. In a nice turn of phrase, Rasmussen describes this as their account of “the blessings of civilisation” (p. 73). Their cautious, moderate, pragmatic, and empirical defense of freedom under the rule of law and the commercial society emerging around them has had a lasting impact on the way we think about the modern world.
The high point of the book is the account of what is often taken to be the most difficult incident in the pair’s friendship. When Hume was close to death he asked his friend to arrange for the posthumous publication of his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, a work which remains one of the most devastating sceptical works in the philosophy of religion. Smith cautioned his friend against publication and ultimately refused to commit himself to publishing the piece. The exchange between the two has often been dealt with in such a way as to portray Smith as a coward unwilling to honour his friend’s final request. In Chapter 10 Rasmussen provides a much-needed corrective to this tendency to damn Smith by showing that all of Hume’s friends advised against publication, that he himself had held back from publishing for precisely the same reasons that Smith stated, and that ultimately his publisher agreed with Smith. When we consider the impact that Smith’s eulogy had and the criticism it brought on him, his reluctance becomes more forgivable, and we can perhaps divest ourselves of the indignation of a hindsight judgement from a world more tolerant of religious scepticism. Smith had clearly spent many years defending his friend from the criticism of the likes of Samuel Johnson (pp. 116–17) and James Boswell (pp. 226–27), and his affection for Hume is apparent. Hume, it seems, accepted his friend’s qualms about the Dialogues and did not hold it against him. His final letter was to Smith and he ends it touchingly: “Adieu my dearest friend” (p. 213). Rasmussen’s book is a sympathetic account of the closeness of two of the world’s greatest thinkers and the warmth of the affection that he evokes is a fine testament to their friendship and his writing.
