Anarchism fails mainly through its naive assumptions about the incidence of trust

Evidence

The anarchist thesis is that there is nothing wrong with the state of nature; or, that there is nothing wrong with it which is not even more dramatically wrong with organized and concentrated coercive power. Of these two beliefs the second, especially since the invention of nuclear weapons, is very substantially more plausible than the first (indeed, in a wide variety of settings at different times — from Buenos Aires to Phnom-Penh — it has been proved very evidently valid). It is helpful to present the deficiencies of anarchism as a theory not by stressing its exceedingly skimpy and implausible conception of the causal determinants of collective social life and its vicissitudes (a charge which can scarcely be denied), but rather by underlining its blatantly capricious views about the incidence of trust in human social relations. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1090

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s Luhmann/Hardin synthesis: where sight and monitoring collapse (as in Saramago’s blindness epidemic), anarchic trust assumptions prove capricious — the state of nature needs observability to function.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what does the author mean by anarchism being ‘capricious’ about the incidence of trust — theoretical grounds or just empirical plausibility?