Legal inequality among citizens destroys the trust contracts depend on

Evidence

In any well-ordered republic there must be equality before the law. Such a republic could only exist, Doria informed the president of the Magistrature of Commerce in 1740, when the city was once again living ‘in the liberty of its constitution and the trust which is sustained by a rigorous and strong justice’ (1953: 163). For no one will be prepared to trust another who enjoys a different legal status to himself. The positive laws of the community are also, Genovesi insisted, civil contracts, and contracts, of course, rely more heavily upon trust than they do upon the possibility — always precarious — of enforcing them. In the absence of trust, he pointed out, ‘there can be no certainty in contracts and hence no force to the laws’, and a society in that condition is effectively reduced ‘to a state of semi-savagery’ (1803: 113-16). — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1836

Categorization

• XREF: Genovesi’s claim that contracts rest on trust more than enforceability maps to the reader’s core thesis: predictable observability undercuts opportunistic behavior, so collapsed trust reduces society to semi-savagery — almost a gloss on Saramago’s Hobbesian descent.
• DEFINE: Defines trust’s dependency: equality before the law plus predictable justice sustains trust, which underwrites contract as a civil institution.