Khaldun held that urban specialization destroys communal trust.

Evidence

Khaldun says that urban life is incompatible with trust and cohesion. His concern is with the transition from traditional, anarchic Muslim societies in North Africa to urban societies. The very fact that these societies are urban means that urban lineages accept governmental authority (Gellner 1988, 147). Urban organization and economic specialization separate individuals from their relatives and immerse them in a larger, less knowable society. Hence they cannot be anarchic and, on Khaldun’s mistaken argument, it immediately follows that trust is at risk. In Khaldun’s vision, the city is made up of specialists; and metaphorically speaking, a specialist has no cousins. In a tribal culture the specialist is despised. Every excellence is a form of specialization, and specialization precludes full citizenship. The unspecialized human being constitutes the moral norm. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 862

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reading purpose: Khaldun’s claim that visible community (‘cousins’) underwrites trust parallels Luhmann’s ‘familiarity’ as the baseline that sight and immediacy generate. The transition to a ‘larger, less knowable society’ is precisely what blindness enacts in Saramago’s city.
• SEED: The phrase ‘a specialist has no cousins’ could anchor an essay on how division of labor erodes the social embeddedness that produces spontaneous trust.