The Infidel and the
Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship That Shaped Modern
Thought
by Dennis G Rasmussen
For
historical writers, a feud is a gift—lurid attacks, entertaining insults,
factions, court cases—all guarantee drama. Love affairs are even easier with
ecstasies, cries de coeur, torrents
of letters, the language heated and glowing, rising sometimes into poetry. But
friendship, what is there to write about in a friendship? What will the
emotional highlight be, a letter of congratulation, a heartfelt testimonial?
The author can note the times and places of their meeting, but even if Boswell
were on the sideline recording every word, it would likely consist of little
more than good-humoured banter mixed with shop talk. In The Infidel and the Professor political science professor Dennis C.
Rasmussen tries, quite successfully, to bring to life the friendship between
the two premier figures of the eighteenth century Scottish Enlightenment: David
Hume, about whom Isaiah Berlin wrote “no man has influenced the history of
philosophical thought to a deeper and more disturbing degree,” the infidel, the
great skeptic, whose far-reaching doubts unnerved the religious establishment;
and Adam Smith, the professor, the placater of the establishment, author of The Wealth of Nations, which has been
described precisely as “the one book between Newton’s Principia and Darwin’s The
Origin of Species that actually, substantially, and almost immediately
started improving the quality of human life and thought” and extravagantly as
“probably the most important book that has ever been written.”
Hume,
twelve years senior to Smith, is remembered today for his philosophical works,
with John Locke and George Berkeley as a founder of British empiricism, for his
famous analysis of causality as merely the “constant conjunction” of events,
and for his skeptical examination of arguments for religion. But in his essays
and in his six-volume History of England
he wrote about much more than philosophy, including political economy, where Smith
would make his mark. Rasmussen spends a good deal of time tracing—with a light
touch, thankfully—the pervasive intellectual influence Hume exerted on Smith,
presenting the first of Smith’s two books, The
Theory of Moral Sentiments, as a quiet dialogue with Hume. Even The Wealth of Nations, Smith’s magnum
opus, his most original work, was influenced in critical ways by Hume’s
writings.
Intellectual influences aside, however,
depicting the friendship remains problematic. Because Hume was a regular letter
writer, Rasmussen does what he can by quoting Hume’s invitations to Smith to
join him in Edinburgh or meet him in London or Paris. And he reveals in detail
their itineraries as they move about, even from house to house, showing how
their paths crossed, or might have crossed, even when he can offer nothing
about whether they did in fact meet or what happened if they met. He quotes
their expressions of esteem and describes the small favours they did for each
other in the business of publishing and book promotion. It is all gentle and
civilized, entirely fitting for major thinkers of the Enlightenment. But it
does not stir the blood.
To add pizzazz to the book, Rasmussen makes
set pieces of the few incidents which were dramatic(-ish). The oft-told story
of Hume’s encounter with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, gets its own
chapter. Rousseau, fleeing arrest warrants in France and Switzerland for his
radical ideas, and frightened by the mobs that had stoned his house, accepted
an offer from Hume to help get him out of France and find him shelter in
England. Friends of Hume warned “you are warming a viper in your bosom,” and,
sure enough, the edifying spectacle of a great, disruptive writer coming to the
aid of a fellow great, disruptive writer soon fell to pieces. Rousseau,
unstable and delusional, accused Hume of leading a conspiracy to silence him
and bury him in obscurity. Upon Rousseau’s returning to France incognito, Hume
published documentation of the affair and, in his private correspondence, made
several waspish comments about Rousseau, probably, given his genial
personality, the only remarks of that nature he ever made in his life.
For twenty years after finishing his History of England, Hume stopped
publishing. “Too old, too fat, too lazy, and too rich,” he explained to friends.
“When I see my bulk on a shelf, as well as when I see it in a glass, I would
fain prevent my growing more corpulent either way.” It was during and after his
final illness that Smith’s part in the friendship was put to the test. Hume
asked Smith to oversee the publication of his yet-unpublished Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.
It would be his most thorough (and skeptical, of course) discussion of the
rational arguments for religion. Despite their many years of friendship and
despite the poignant timing of the request, Smith refused. Although Smith was
probably a Deist, if not an atheist, almost certainly not a Christian, he had
lived his whole life hiding his true beliefs to avoid the hornet’s nest of the
religious establishment. Hume did not press him and found another acquaintance
to take on the job. In the end, however, Smith redeemed himself somewhat and was
roundly condemned as a result. While the establishment eagerly waited to hear
of Hume’s deathbed conversion to Christianity or, just as good, of his dying in
spiritual agony, Smith published a tribute that described Hume dying serenely
and concluded with a sentence that caused an uproar: “Upon the whole, I have
always considered him, both in his lifetime and since his death, as approaching
as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the
nature of human frailty will permit.” It generated the eighteenth century
equivalent of a Twitterstorm.
The
Infidel and the Professor may offer no new revelations or overturn big
theories, but it makes for a thoroughly enjoyable read. Rasmussen’s prose is
transparent and easy, free of the usual academic clunkiness. And, luckily for
the reader, we hear much more from witty and good-humoured Hume than from serious
and reserved Smith, giving us, for example, this account of Hume’s visit to
Maria Theresa, the Holy Roman Empress: “After we had a little conversation with
her Imperial Majesty, we were to walk backwards, through a very long room,
curtseying all the way. And there was very great danger of falling foul of each
other, as well as of tumbling topsy-turvy. She saw the difficulty we were in
and immediately called to us, Allez,
allez, messieurs, sans ceremonies. Vous n’etes pas accoutumés a ce movemen et
le plancher est glissant. ("Go on, go on, sirs, without ceremony. You are not accustomed to this movement and the floor is slippery.") We esteemed ourselves very much obliged to her
for this attention, especially my companions, who were desperately afraid of my
falling on them and crushing them.”
