Political trust is a realistic assessment of irreversible division of labour, not psychic submission

Evidence

In political life after a certain stage of economic development the only policies which are open to human beings carry massive risks. In particular they expose men and women to appalling harm through the treachery or fecklessness of those in a position to exert concentrated coercive power. Trust in the relation between ruled and ruler is not a supine psychic compulsion on the part of the former. Rather, it is an eminently realistic assessment of the irreversibility of a political division of labour and a sharp reminder, from the former to the latter, of the sole conditions that can make that division humanly benign. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1229

Categorization

• DEFINE: Precisely distinguishes political trust from ‘supine psychic compulsion’ — a cleaner operational definition than most trust literature gives.
• XREF: Connects directly to Hardin on trust as encapsulated interest and to the reader’s ongoing Luhmann/Hardin analytical thread.