The link between the religious belief in individual agency and a resultant economic success is what energizes most american protestants to day. The movement away from predestinarian calvinism in the english speaking protestant world was a kind of rolling debate. And as a result, smith and hume just heard this debate all around them, even though they weren't religious figures. As a result, their world view took on this idea of a more benign a view of the human character.
In episode 162 of The Michael Shermer Show, Michael speaks with one of the nation’s preeminent experts on economic policy, Benjamin Friedman, about his new book Religion and the Rise of Capitalism — a major reassessment of the foundations of modern economic thinking that explores the profound influence of an until-now unrecognized force — religion.
Critics of contemporary economics complain that belief in free markets — among economists as well as many ordinary citizens — is a form of religion. And, it turns out, that in a deeper, more historically grounded sense there is something to that idea. Contrary to the conventional historical view of economics as an entirely secular product of the Enlightenment, Benjamin Friedman demonstrates that religion exerted a powerful influence from the outset.