The Infidel and the Professor

Hume had written one book he did not dare release. His Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion was a devastating, patient dismantling of the argument that the order of the universe proves a benevolent designer. He had drafted it in the 1750s, revised it for years, and kept it in a drawer, knowing that publishing it in his lifetime would be a step too far even for him. As death approached in 1776, the question of what to do with the manuscript became urgent — and he turned to the friend he trusted most.

Hume asked Smith to see the Dialogues into print after his death. It should have been a simple last favor between friends. Instead it opened the one real fault line in the relationship. Smith did not want to do it. He was not being cowardly about his own convictions so much as calculating about consequences: he foresaw, correctly, that his name attached to Hume's most explosive book would follow him for the rest of his life. He gently, repeatedly, tried to talk Hume out of publishing at all, suggesting the manuscript stay unpublished or be handled by someone else.

It is easy to file Hume under philosophy and Smith under economics and leave them in separate rooms. Rasmussen's argument runs the other way: the two bodies of work grew out of the same conversation, and Smith's famous economics is soaked in Hume's earlier thinking. Hume had written, before Smith, about commerce, money, trade balances, and interest — arguing that commercial society made people not greedier but gentler, that trade civilized manners and softened the old warrior virtues. Much of what we now credit to The Wealth of Nations was already circulating in Hume's essays of the early 1750s.

Smith took these threads and built the systematic account Hume never quite assembled. But the underlying vision was shared: a society could be held together not by pious self-denial or by the commands of a church, but by ordinary self-interest channeled through exchange, and by the natural human tendency to seek the approval of others. Where a theologian saw markets as a arena of sin to be restrained, Hume and Smith saw a mechanism by which private passions produced public benefit — and by which a modern, freer, more tolerant world became possible.

Return to that letter Smith wrote after Hume died. He described his friend's last days with tenderness and precision, and closed with a line that would haunt him: that he had always considered Hume, both in his lifetime and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as human frailty will permit. On its face, an ordinary tribute. In context, an outrage — because Hume was the most famous atheist of the age, and Smith was insisting, publicly, that such a man had lived and died well.

This is where the friendship stops being a private matter and becomes an argument. The eighteenth century took as settled that the unbeliever must die in terror, that a life without faith curdled into despair at the end. Hume's serene, joking death refuted this in the most concrete way possible, and Smith's letter forced the refutation into public view. To describe an infidel's death as good was to suggest that virtue and happiness did not depend on the church at all — and readers understood exactly what was being claimed.

Smith outlived Hume by fourteen years and never wrote another word about religion in the direct way that letter had. He had learned the lesson the abuse taught him. When he died in 1790, he had his own unpublished papers burned, taking care not to leave behind anything that might provoke a second reckoning. The infidel had been braver on paper; the professor had been braver in the one act of loyalty that mattered, and then he grew careful again.