David Hume is widely seen today as maybe the greatest philosopher ever to write in the English language. He was 12 years older than Smith and he had finished writing almost all of his philosophical works before Smith even began to write his. As philosophers go, David Hume was an empiricist. Meaning that he thought that all knowledge comes through experience, through the senses, rather than some kind of abstract reason.
How did an affable 18th-century “moral philosopher” become the patron saint of cutthroat capitalism? Does “the invisible hand” mean what everyone thinks it does? We travel to Smith’s hometown in Scotland to uncover the man behind the myth. (Part 1 of a series.)