BIBLIOGRAPHY- Smith and Hume
1) Rasumussen, Dennis, 2017. The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship that Shaped Modern Thought, Princeton, Princeton University Press.
An engaging biographical account of the friendship between Hume and Smith, which highlights a number of features of their thought.
2) Haakonssen, Knud, 1981, The Science of a Legislator: The Natural Jurisprudence of David Hume & Adam Smith, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Haakonssen analyzes and compares the jurisprudential thinking of Hume and Smith, while contextualizing their thought in relation to predecessors like Grotius and Pufendorf. Haakonssen highlights the many ways in which Smith develops themes first introduced in Hume’s political writings, while offering a unique account of how liberty, property and political authority have varied with changing times and circumstances. Haakonssen grants particular attention to Smith’s discussion of “public law” in his Glasgow lectures.
3) Gill, Michael, 2014. Humean Moral Pluralism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
A highly sophisticated work of philosophical reconstruction that puts the thought of Hume and his contemporaries into dialogue with trends in contemporary analytic moral philosophy. Gill traces the sophisticated manner in which Smith takes up and modifies Hume’s commitment to moral pluralism, the view that there can be a variety of different reasons for acting morally and that these reasons can come into irreconcilable conflict with one another.
4) Sagar, Paul, 2018. The Opinion of Mankind: Sociability and the Theory of the State from Hobbes to Smith. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Sagar’s book surveys theories of political authority in the early modern period. Sagar argues that Hume is unique in this period for rejecting the Hobbesian claim that political authority rests on sovereignty. In its place, Hume forwards the theory that political authority is grounded in “opinion,” his name for the shifting motivations to follow the law and submit to rulers that political subjects experience. This shift in emphasis gives Hume’s political theory a more sociological and historical emphasis than those of his predecessors. According to Sagar, Smith follows Hume in developing this “political theory of opinion,” fleshing out the sketchy historical details of Hume’s account, while also modifying this account in several important respects, including in his account of the origin of principles of justice and their institutionalization in law.
5) Sagar, Paul, 2017. “Beyond Sympathy: Smith’s Rejection of Hume’s Moral Theory,” Brit ish Journal for the History of Philosophy 25, 681–705.
Sagar examines the ways that Smith’s moral philosophy departs from Hume’s, despite the fact that both thinkers share a commitment to a sentiment-based virtue ethics. Sagar claims that the often-noted differences between each thinker’s account of sympathy are grounded in a more fundamental disagreement about the nature of the virtues; more specifically, Sagar argues that Smith seeks to problematize Hume’s distinction between the artificial and natural virtues, while also calling into doubt various philosophical implications that Hume draws on the basis of this distinction.
6) Martin, Marie, 1990. “Utility and Morality: Adam Smith's Critique of Hume” in Hume Studies 16, 107-120.
Martin examines Smith’s critique (presented in book IV of TMS) of Hume’s claim that considerations of utility play a central role in guiding in our moral judgments. On Martin’s reconstruction, Smith’s most central (and damaging) criticism is that Hume’s emphasis on utility obscures the essentially social nature of morality. Martin concludes by defending Hume from this Smithean criticism.
7) Fleischacker, Samuel, 2012. “Sympathy in Hume and Smith: A Contrast, Critique and Reconstruction,” in Intersubjectivity and Objectivity in Husserl and Adam Smith, C. Fricke and D. Føllesdal (eds.), Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, pp. 273–311.
Fleischacker examines the unique theories of sympathy found in each thinker’s work, comparing and contrasting them along a number of dimensions before presenting a Wittgensteinian critique of certain presumptions about the privacy of the mental life shared by these accounts.
8) Pack, Spencer J., and Eric Schliesser, 2006. “Smith’s Humean Criticism of Hume’s Account of the Origin of Justice.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 44.1, 47–63
Pack and Schliesser argue that Smith criticizes Hume’s theory of the origin of principles of justice for being insufficiently Humean (that is to say, for failing to adhere to the very principles of explanation that Hume takes to be definitive of his “science of man”). Central to this criticism is the claim that Hume fails to grant sufficient attention to the role that “unsocial” passions like resentment play in establishing principles of justice. In this manner, Pack and Schliesser argue, Smith takes himself to be offering a more thoroughly Humean explanation of the psychological and material causes of the social institutions and normative principles that govern justice.
9) Schliesser, Eric, 2003. “The Obituary of a Vain Philosopher: Adam Smith’s Reflections on Hume’s Life,” Hume Studies 29.2, 327–62
Schliesser analyzes Smith’s notorious obituary of Hume, fleshing out the philosophical and historical background of Smith’s moving (and controversial) tribute to his departed friend.
10) Sayre-McCord, Geoffrey, 2013. “Hume and Smith on Sympathy, Approbation and Moral Judgment”. Social Philosophy and Policy 30, 208–36.
A philosophically sophisticated reconstruction and comparison of Hume’s and Smith’s theories of sympathy as well as the role that this faculty plays in giving rise to both sentiments of approbation and judgments of virtue. As Sayer-McCord points out, these three dimensions of Hume’s and Smith’s theories are often conflated, leading to a great deal of philosophical confusion. In an effort to address this confusion, Sayer-McCord reconstructs the central elements of each theory, pointing out that, in each case, Hume and Smith are careful to emphasize the distinction between feeling approval and judging that something is proper or meritorious.