There have been many famous philosophical friendships. Political scientist Dennis C. Rasmussen lists some of the most important: Socrates and Plato; Plato and Aristotle; Bentham and Mill; Erasmus and More; Heidegger and Arendt; Marx and Engels; Sartre and de Beauvoir; Whitehead and Russell; Emerson and Thoreau. (He might have added Rousseau and Diderot, though that one ended badly.) But as Rasmussen points out, the great age gap between Plato and Socrates, and between Plato and Aristotle, made these relationships closer to those of mentor and protégé than to friendships between equals. In terms of influence, depth of thought and true intimacy between the two parties, Rasmussen posits that the alliance between David Hume (1711-76) and Adam Smith (1723-90), the two greatest figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, was the most momentous of all philosophical friendships, and he celebrates the two men's interconnectedness and the joint impact they made on the modern world in his intelligent and beautifully written new book, The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought.
The claim implicitly made in the book's subtitle could be challenged. Hume and Smith helped to shape modern thought, certainly, but did they shape it on their own? Plenty of their contemporaries and near-contemporaries can fairly be said to have had a hand in this shaping, including Locke, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Franklin, Rousseau, Jefferson, and Madison. But Hume and Smith, both individually and through their joint attempt to create a new, all-inclusive “science of man,” can be seen to have lit fires that still kindle vigorously. Jürgen Habermas claimed that the Enlightenment is an unfinished project, and that statement is never more true than when applied to the works of these two thinkers. Hume, widely believed to be the greatest philosopher to have written in English, is still read by many, and with great pleasure—the fact that he wrote before philosophy (thought) gave way to “philosophy” (an academic discipline with a professional jargon that is largely opaque to the general reader) has much to do with his continuing popularity. But his radically skeptical position, when taken to its logical extension, is terrifying; indeed, it terrified even him, rendering him “affrighted and confounded” when he first followed its logic in his youth, while engaged on his Treatise of Human Nature. There exists no “I,” he concluded, no coherent self, certainly no “soul” in the Christian sense of the term; all we can really claim to be is a series of perceptions. Nor is there any reason, other than wishful thinking, to believe that there is a God. While not defining himself as an atheist—he said he was too skeptical to take that dogmatic position—neither was he a theist of any description. Obviously, these two existential absences, the absence of a God and of a self, are frightening. Therefore, while paying lip service to Hume's intelligence and his mastery of Augustan prose, most of his readers have stopped short of the final abyss; they entertain his speculations while remaining safely within their own belief systems, which tend to include a metaphysical or at least “spiritual” element and a firm belief in the reality, and even the significance, of their own identities.
Smith's intellectual career was strongly influenced by and closely allied with that of Hume, though he is now famous for something very different: he is best known as the father of economics. His Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (published in 1776, the year of Hume's death) is perhaps the most lastingly influential book to come out of the Enlightenment. Smith's contemporaries were immediately aware of its importance, and correctly estimated its value to posterity. Scottish professor Hugh Blair wrote Smith that “your work ought to be, and I am perswaded will in some degree become, the Commercial Code of Nations,” and the historian William Robertson agreed: “your Book must necessarily become a Political or Commercial Code to all Europe.” In the next century, an eminent historian judged that “looking at its ultimate results, [it] is probably the most important book that has ever been written.” A modern author has given his opinion that Wealth of Nations “may be the one book between Newton's Principia and Darwin's Origin of Species that actually, substantially, and almost immediately started improving the quality of human life and thought.”
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