Trust constitutes anarchic order rather than being produced by it

Evidence

Ibn Khaldun, a fourteenth-century Arab historian, supposes that it is precisely anarchy that engenders trust or social cohesion (Gellner 1988, 143). His argument is somewhat circular. In anarchy there are, by definition, no institutional structures for regulating cooperative interactions. Hence if there is uncoerced cooperation, it must typically require trust. That there is trust in instances of anarchic order therefore need not entail that such conditions engender trust, because trust might commonly be constitutive of such order in anarchic conditions more than it is the product of order. That is to say, the causal argument goes the opposite way. If anarchy works at all well for people, that is because there is trust to organize cooperation. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 859

Categorization

• XREF: Inverts the Hobbesian premise the reader is using to frame Blindness — trust is prior to order, not its product. This complicates the reading of the wife as creating order ex nihilo: she may be re-instantiating trust that predates the social.
• DEFINE: Clarifies the causal direction issue in Ibn Khaldun’s anarchy-trust claim — a precise conceptual distinction between trust constitutive of order vs. order engendering trust.