Self-love and sociability: the ‘rudiments of commerce’ in the state of nature

Istvan Hont’s classic work on the theoretical links between the seventeenth-century natural jurists Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf and the eighteenth-century Scottish political economists remains a popular trope among intellectual and economic historians of various stamps. Despite this, a common criticism levelled at Hont remains his relative lack of engagement with the relationship between religion and economics in the early modern period. This paper challenges this aspect of Hont’s narrative by drawing attention to an alternative, albeit complementary, assessment of the natural jurisprudential heritage of eighteenth-century British political economy. Specifically, the article attempts to map on to Hont’s thesis the Christian Stoic interpretation of Grotius and Pufendorf which has gained greater currency in recent years. In doing so, the paper argues that Grotius and Pufendorf’s contributions to the ‘unsocial sociability’ debate do not necessarily lead directly to the Scottish school of political economists, as is commonly assumed. Instead, it contends that a reconsideration of Grotius and Pufendorf as neo-Stoic theorists, particularly via scrutiny of their respective adaptations of the traditional Stoic theory of oikeiosis, steers us towards the heart of the early English ‘clerical’ Enlightenment

Olefin additions on H-Si(111): evidence for a surface chain reaction initiated at isolated dangling bonds

We report the surface chain reaction of styrene with hydrogen-terminated Si(111), H-Si(111) initiated at isolated surface dangling bonds. Electrons from a scanning tunneling microscope in ultrahigh vacuum are used to create surface isolated dangling bonds on H-Si(111) prepared by aqueous ammonium fluoride etch. Exposure of dangling bonds on an otherwise hydrogen terminated surface to as little as 5 langmuirs of styrene leads to the formation of compact islands containing multiple styrene adsorbates bonded to the surface through individual C-Si bonds. From this observation we conclude that these adsorbate islands are the result of a surface chain reaction of styrene with H-Si(111). This result suggests that the key radical-chain propagation step of hydrogen atom abstraction from the silicon surface for the proposed mechanism of reaction of liquid phase terminally unsaturated organic molecules with hydrogen-terminated silicon under free-radical conditions readily occurs.NRC publication: Ye