Adam Smith’s Oxford professors had a problem. Their promising student had become fascinated with David Hume. They had reason to worry. Hume’s philosophy terrified Europe, questioning everything civilization took for granted. Anything Hume touched changed the conversation. Traditional metaphysics did not stand a chance answering his questions. Religion loses its voice. Smith could not stop reading him.

Today, Adam Smith is remembered as the founder of capitalism. In his day, however, he was suspected of being influenced by David Hume, Scotland’s bad boy philosopher. The founder of capitalism was influenced by a perceived philosophical radical.

A friendship that rocked the world

I’m guessing few people knew that the friendship between Smith and Hume would become one of the most politically and socially consequential intellectual relationships of the past thousand years, let alone help shape the intellectual world of Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and the American founding itself.

This July 4th we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the writing of the Declaration of Independence. The American experiment was informed by several intellectual currents. Founders read the Bible, ancient thinkers—Plato, Aristotle, Cicero… Yet they were perhaps most directly shaped by the philosophers of the Enlightenment.

John Locke supplied a language of rights. David Hume offered a psychology of politics. Adam Smith explored how moral life emerges through human sympathy. Montesquieu provided a constitutional architecture capable of restraining power, some of which he likely lifted from Locke’s writings. Together they helped shape the philosophical foundations of the American republic.

When Americans think about the philosophical influences behind the founding, they usually think of English philosopher John Locke. For good reason. The Declaration of Independence reflects Locke’s philosophy, basically plagiarizing him, whom the founders read in college. Ordinary colonists read his ideas, too. Samuel Adams, arguably the most hated revolutionary in the eyes of King George III and Parliament, published Locke’s writings in the Boston Gazette long before 1776, helping spread them throughout the colonies.

Yet Locke was not the only philosopher shaping the intellectual world of the founders. Another was Scottish philosopher David Hume, who was admired by Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton. Hume’s influence on the founding is often overshadowed, despite the fact that many concerns shaping the Constitution reflect Hume’s concerns and questions.

To understand Hume’s........

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