Locke conflated interpersonal trust with citizen-government trust

Evidence

The most striking feature of Locke’s conception, to a modern eye, is its readiness to conflate two issues which most (though not all: see Silver 1985a; 1985b) modern traditions of political understanding regard as so drastically discrepant as to be essentially irrelevant to one another: the psychic and practical relations between individual citizens across the space of private life, and the structural relations between bureaucratic governments and the subjects over whom they rule. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1187

Categorization

• XREF: This conflation is precisely the bridge for the reader’s project — Saramago’s blindness erases the interpersonal trust substrate that Locke treats as continuous with legitimate government. A genuinely useful theoretical hinge.