Social institutions emerge to substitute for trust relationships that cannot work

Evidence

Certain limits are implicit in the nature of trust relationships that depend on cognitive assessments of the trustworthiness of others. Once these limits are taken into account, there are various ways in which cooperation can be achieved in groups, in the economy, and in nongovernmental institutional settings. These particular social structures seem to be responses to the possibilities and limits on organizing our cooperative relationships as trust relationships. Much of social structure can be explained as a response to obstacles to resolving problems of cooperation and coordination through simple individual-to-individual trust. Indeed, Hobbes’ political theory addresses the need for government to back cooperative life when trust relationships without such coercive backing would be inadequate to the task. In contexts in which individual-to-individual trust commonly fails, we find institutional and cultural arrangements that make life work more or less well in lieu of trust. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 787

Categorization

• XREF: Directly connects to Luhmann’s claim that trust substitutes for coercive mechanisms, and equally links to the Hobbesian substrate central to the reader’s Saramago integration — institutional backing replaces failed mutual monitoring. — connects to: Falling social trust creates a void that instrumentarian power fills with certainty. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1224; Trust emerges when clear rules scaffold otherwise informal group exchange. — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 833; Unintended consequences of private passion can form durable social institutions — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2047
• DEFINE: Establishes the chapter’s core framing: social structure as a response to the limits of interpersonal trust, foreshadowing Saramago’s collapse of institutions when blind people can no longer trust each other.