Authoritarian regimes can overcome economic vicious circles without creating genuine trust

Evidence

Nevertheless, even if it is conceded that the government of the ROK has in this way overcome what might otherwise have been an economically debilitating vicious circle, it cannot be said that it has created trust. On the contrary. And it is indeed perfectly possible that if and when the present pattern of rule changes in the country, as Chun Doohwan intends it to do in 1988, existing cooperations and the successful economic organization which depends on them could dissolve or even collapse. The despotism could turn out not to have broken the circle after all, or simply to have instituted another. It could turn out not, as it certainly seems at present to have done, to have created that ‘restless activity, superabundant force, and energy that’ in Tocqueville’s view (quoted by Elster 1983: 95) is ‘never found elsewhere’ than in democracies and ‘which, however little favoured by circumstances, can do wonders’. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1655

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s core Hardin thesis — coercion can substitute for trust in constraining opportunism, which is exactly the Luhmann/Hardin synthesis being built with Saramago.