The Problem of TrustAuthor: Adam B. Seligman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Number Of Pages: 240
Publication Date: 1997-08-04
ISBN-10 / ASIN: 0691012423
ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780691012421
The problem of trust in social relationships was central to the emergence of the modern form of civil society and much discussed by social and political philosophers of the early modern period. Over the past few years, in response to the profound changes associated with postmodernity, trust has returned to the attention of political scientists, sociologists, economists, and public policy analysts. In this sequel to his widely admired book, The Idea of Civil Society, Adam Seligman analyzes trust as a fundamental issue of our present social relationships. Setting his discussion in historical and intellectual context, Seligman asks whether trust--which many contemporary critics, from Robert Putnam through Francis Fukuyama, identify as essential in creating a cohesive society--can continue to serve this vital role.
Seligman traverses a wide range of examples, from the minutiae of everyday manners to central problems of political and economic life, showing throughout how civility and trust are being displaced in contemporary life by new "external' system constraints inimical to the development of trust. Disturbingly, Seligman shows that trust is losing its unifying power precisely because the individual, long assumed to be the ultimate repository of rights and values, is being reduced to a sum of group identities and an abstract matrix of rules. The irony for Seligman is that, in becoming postmodern, we seem to be moving backward to a premodern condition in which group sanctions rather than trust are the basis of group life.
I AM GRATEFUL to a number of people for their help in sorting out my ideas on trust and presenting them here in a coherent form. My greatest debt is perhaps to my students in the Sociology of Ideas seminar at the University of Colorado, Boulder, especially to Jay Watterworth, Taunya McGlochlin, and Carrie Foote-Ardah. All engaged me in a debate with these issues over a number of very fruitful years. In addition, John Holmwood read the entire manuscript (more than once) and provided extensive suggestions, comments, and encouragement. Robert Wuthnow and Dennis Wrong also provided helpful comments and saved me from making a number of embarrassing mistakes of fact and interpretation. A continuing, four-year debate with Mark Lichbach on the relative merits of rational choice theories as adequate explanations of social reality has provided a necessary background without which this book would probably not have been written.
The book draws on older discussions as well, and the analysis of otherhood and its transformation found in chapter two is drawn from material first prepared a decade ago in Jerusalem with Zali Gurevitz. Much of the argument presented in chapter four was first published as “Animadversions upon Civil Society and Civic Virtue in the last Decade of the Twentieth Century” in Civic Society: Theory, History, Comparison (Oxford: Polity Press, 1995), edited by John Hall, who pushed me, over the last few years, to think through these and other issues related to the problem of trust. More recent discussions and the opportunity to present some of the ideas developed here were offered by the Fundacion Manuel Garcia-Pelayo in Caracas and by the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture of Boston University and its “Working Group on Civil Society and Civic Virtue,” all of whose participants offered helpful comments on work then in progress. I also owe a special debt of gratitude to the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture for a generous research grant which supported work on this book during the 1995–96 academic year. That the Institute has subsequently offered itself to me as an intellectual home is itself an instructive example of the interweaving of system confidence and individual trust in the modern world. Finally, very special thanks to Carrie Foote-Ardah must again be recorded for her selfless help in the preparation of this manuscript for publication.
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