Book: The Infidel and the Professor: David Hum, Adam Smith and the Friendship that Shaped Modern Thought
Author: Dennis C. Rasmussen
Year published: 2017
Review: David Hume and Adam Smith were two pillars of the Scottish enlightenment. They were also great friends from their first meeting in 1749 until Hume's death in 1776. Much has been written about each of them, but Rasmussen has taken on the task of writing specifically about their friendship. He succeeds pretty well, but has the problem that, good friends though they were, there simply isn't that much evidence of what their friendship was about. Neither was a tremendous letter-writer by the standards of the day - although Hume wrote far more than Smith - and when they saw each other in person they did not record what happened in great detail.
Fortuitously, Rasmussen also doesn't not assume a huge amount of knowledge of Hume or Smith on the part of his readers. He is very good at explicating their thought. One gets a good sense of what each of them thought on a variety of issues. Rasmussen also covers what they said about each other (nearly all complimentary), how Smith reacted to Hume's conflict with Rousseau (Rousseau appears to be the only person who made Hume really angry), and how Smith's desire to avoid "clamor" led him to be more circumspect about his own views on religion.
A book with a title like this might be a specialist tome for scholars of one or both men; this is not. It is a work for a general audience and it's quite well done.
About the Author: Dennis C. Rasmussen is a professor of political science at Tufts University.
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