Smith and David Hume
Smith's closest friend was the philosopher David Hume, whose ideas about human nature, sympathy, and causation profoundly shaped Smith's economics and moral philosophy.
An Unlikely Friendship
Adam Smith and David Hume met in the early 1750s when Smith was a young lecturer at Glasgow and Hume was already Scotland's most famous (and controversial) philosopher. Despite Hume being twelve years older, they became the closest of friends, exchanging letters for over twenty-five years on everything from philosophy and economics to publishing gossip and personal health.
Their friendship was also intellectually generative. Hume had published his Political Discourses in 1752, which contained essays on money, trade, and taxation that directly influenced Smith's later work. Smith, in turn, shared drafts of what would become The Wealth of Nations with Hume, who offered detailed feedback. When Hume died in 1776, Smith described the loss as the death of 'a man who, upon the whole, I had always considered as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit.'