Social trust evolved from interpersonal relations to abstract anonymities of mass society

Evidence

Social relations have generally evolved from a concrete, interpersonal basis to the abstract mass anonymities of political economy, an evolution obscured by a modern usage which tends to objectify persons as abstractions, much as pre-industrial cultures personify objects. Social theorists perennially ask how qualities of trust, fairness, and cooperation which belong naturally to intimate social worlds might be projected on to the modern stage of markets and states. Neoclassical economists, however, by basing their most general propositions on a formal rational calculus of individual decision-making, have tended to obscure the sociological distinction on which this paper hinges. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2423

Categorization

• XREF: Directly maps to the reader’s Luhmann integration — concrete interpersonal trust degrading into abstract mass anonymity is precisely what the white blindness reverses/compresses. — connects to: Mass-society theory evolved by reconciling homogeneity with differentiation — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 156; Mass markets forced consumers to trust unseen strangers and corporations — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 2631
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does the plagues’ collapse of mass society re-concretize relations, or push them into more brutal abstraction?