The Infidel and the Professor by Rasmussen Dennis C.;

Author:Rasmussen, Dennis C.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2017-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

It is harder to gauge the level of Smith’s engagement with Hume in his second book than in his first.6 While Hume is never mentioned by name in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, his influence is palpable throughout; indeed, there is little question that Hume was Smith’s primary—though certainly not sole—interlocutor in the construction and presentation of his moral theory. There is much to suggest that Hume also played a key role in the development of Smith’s views on political economy. In The Wealth of Nations Smith cites Hume by name five times, and at another point he transcribes four full paragraphs from The History of England, calling its author “by far the most illustrious philosopher and historian of the present age.”7 One of the five explicit citations, to be discussed in the next section, appears in what may be the key paragraph of the entire book. In another Smith notes that while it had long been thought that interest rates depend principally on the quantity of gold and silver in circulation, “this notion, which at first sight seems so plausible, has been so fully exposed by Mr. Hume, that it is, perhaps, unnecessary to say any thing more about it.”8 (True to the book’s prolix form, however, Smith proceeds to elaborate the point for several more pages.)

Dugald Stewart acknowledges that Smith’s views on political economy were deeply shaped by others, including his teacher Francis Hutcheson and his childhood friend James Oswald of Dunnikier, but he nevertheless judges that “the Political Discourses of Mr Hume were evidently of greater use to Mr Smith, than any other book that had appeared prior to his lectures”—that is, Smith’s lectures on political economy at Glasgow, on which The Wealth of Nations was partly based.9 A contemporary scholar concurs that Hume’s Political Discourses “exercised a profound influence on Smith” and that “without them, The Wealth of Nations is almost unimaginable.”10 Nor was it only the Political Discourses that influenced Smith’s thinking on these matters. Hume also discusses commerce and commercial policy extensively in The History of England—Ernest Campbell Mossner calls it “the first popular history explaining and defending capitalistic society”—and in fact several of Smith’s citations of Hume are to this work rather than to his essays.11

Yet compared to The Theory of Moral Sentiments there are actually fewer passages in The Wealth of Nations in which Smith is clearly developing or contesting his friend’s views. Moreover, some of the key themes of the book were scarcely even broached in Hume’s writings, most notably Smith’s claim regarding the centrality of the division of labor to productivity.12 For these reasons, the distinguished economist Jacob Viner goes so far as to suggest that “in The Wealth of Nations there is little sign that Smith had profited from Hume’s contribution.”13 This seems much too strong. It is impossible to name a single key interlocutor or source of influence for a book as sprawling and detail-oriented as The Wealth of Nations, but Hume’s impact was surely significant, even if

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