Trust

In the past twenty years, trust has become a major topic of public and academic debate: what it is; how it operates; whether we have lost it; how we can recover it. In this powerful and challenging contribution, Geoffrey Hosking argues that western democracy is in the throes of a real crisis of trust, by which we are even more endangered than we realise. At the same time, trust must be understood in historical context. There has never been a ‘golden age of trust’: trust and distrust coexist in all societies. The historian’s role is to show how they are configured in different times and places, to help us understand the nature of trust in our own society and how to strengthen it. Hosking begins in his own field, with a chapter on ‘the land of maximum distrust’: the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Through a gripping combination of narrative and documentary analysis, he reveals the ways in which Stalin sowed distrust throughout Russian politics and society, creating widespread paranoia and the breakdown of social and personal relationships. He shows, too, how people fought back, creating small, manageable circles of those whom they could trust for specific purposes from buying scarce goods to mediating contact with officials, or simply as friends

Context (archaeology · Democracy · Distrust · Literature · Narrative · Paranoia · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · History · Law · Legal principles and applications · Psychology · Weber, Simmel, Sociological Theory