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Towards a unified theory of Trust
2025 Unifying the theory of trust : Imperial law and biometric government
WISER’s Trust project invites you to join us for a series of talks and discussions on problems of trust as we build towards a new theory, and a set of policy recommendations, suited to the problems of trust that have long been obvious on the African continent, and which now are global.
[Please register here on Zoom.]
What is trust? How has it been built and undermined over time? What do these characteristics of trust-building teach us about the design and regulation of the effort to engineer trust using biometric technologies today?
In this lecture we summarise much of what we have learned about the theory of trust thus far, drawing out the competing models for the development of trust from Georg Simmel, Henry Maine and FW Maitland. Simmel’s arguments have been deeply influential in the European and in the American sociological accounts of trust, and the lecture will explain the influence of and problems with the leap of faith argument that derives from this work. Almost all of the English-speaking countries followed the path of self-regulated fiduciaries in law and in associational life that was mapped out by Maitland; South Africa (and the rest of the African continent) followed Maine’s despotic paternalism where the state acted unconstrained. Trust in the European and Latin American civil law traditions took a third route dominated by the notarial law on the one hand, and by Simmel’s theory of trust on the other. We can learn a lot about this European trajectory from the work Max Weber published before the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism because it echoes some of Maitland’s fine-grained institutional interest in trust but with a very different political assessment.
Scholars of trust in the civil law societies carefully ignore the arguments about the importance of divisible property, fiduciary responsibility and equitable remedies first laid out by Maitland. One reason for this is that the difficult tasks of managing the transfer of property, specification of debts, assessment of credit worthiness, family conflicts over inheritance, tax liabilities and, especially, personal identification are handled by notaries in these societies. Notarial law shares a common history in the legal institutions of the Catholic church with the English law of equity, but it has been shaped by a quite distinct project of state-building, and a very conscious reliance on the technologies of paperwork ledgers and professional self-regulation. The centrality of the notaries in the colonization of Latin America – and their alliances with the wealthiest families in particular – has tainted their political reputation on the right and the left in contemporary policy debates, but their trust building work, in comparison with the computerised underwriting of debts in the Anglophone world, is important and interesting.
In his remarkable discussion with the anarchist social theorist David Graeber in 2014, Peter Thiel spoke angrily about the impossibility of developing an innovative payment system like Paypal in the US today. While much is still opaque about the Paypal Mafia’s alliance with the newly elected US president, it does seem, in part, that their political interest is in dismantling the regulatory state that has been built, especially around finance, over the last decade. The conflict centres, at least for now, around the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that was set up by Senator Elizabeth Warren in 2010 as the US begins, belatedly, to open to fintech in several different forms.This lecture reviews what Musk and Thiel, and the others, actually did at Paypal – the many problems and conflicts and scams that were triggered by the new form of purely digital money that they popularised. The lecture will discuss Musk’s plans for returning Twitter / X to his original plans for an “everything app.” We examine what the dismantling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and the plans to formalise digital coins mean in context of the emerging frameworks for Open Banking and Open Finance. And then we ask what this all means for the activities of the FATF and the South African effort to shake free of grey-listing.
Maitland and Makdisi attribute the origins of trust law to the medieval crusaders’ need to protect the property rights of their wives and children over long periods of absence and to their exposure to the principles and practices of waqf, especially in the inns during their time in Palestine. More recent research on medieval law suggests that the tradition of divisible property in uses, which set the foundation of trust law, emerged from the prohibitions of usury and debt in the Jewish merchant law, prior to their expulsion from England in the 1290s. Greif’s work on the Jewish Maghrebi traders’ law of trust predates this English history by several centuries, and it provides a laboratory study of the mingling of religious law and citizenship, divisible property, recorded debts, and long distance trade in the foundations of financial capitalism.
Drawing on Simon Szreter’s recent work on the institutions and effects of the English 17th century poor law, this lecture asks whether an expansive redistributive welfare infrastructure is an essential determinant of trust. Confidence that the local welfare state and local philanthropies would that seems to be required for the forms of risk-taking livelihoods that underpin capitalist growth. Using the arguments about trustworthiness and credit from Muldrew’s Economy of Obligations the lecture explores the less well known histories of philanthropic welfare from Jones, Slack and Hindle following the changes of the 1602 Charitable Uses Act. These two reforms – the universal poor law and the statute of charitable trusts – encouraged a dense, general network of welfare and philanthropic institutions in England responsible for relieving poverty and a host of other local responsibilities, including schools, hospitals and road building. The combination fostered distinctive forms of mobility, freedom to abandon the land and labour specialisations that nurtured the industrial changes of the 18th century. Both the poor law and the charitable trusts began to disintegrate at the end of the 18th century, making way in the next century for the market fundamentalism of the political economists and the utilitarians and the Dickensian misery of the 19th century.
As South Africans know well, trust in institutions is substantially determined by infrastructures, their capacities and scope and, especially, by their failures. Conspicuous failures of the networks of roads, rail, water, electricity and sewerage prompt citizens to mistrust the competence and integrity of the bureaucracies responsible for their development and maintenance. Infrastructural failures nourish public worries about corruption, the harvesting of public assets, queue-jumping and enclaving. The failures also make it difficult to weigh the social benefits of the dramatic expansions in the scale of democratic infrastructures, and hard (perhaps impossible) to commit to the funding arrangements required to sustain them. These problems are increasingly universal – infrastructural failures have featured prominently in the trust crises in the recent elections in Britain, South Africa, the US and Germany. Where social scientists, like Michael Mann, wrote confidently about infrastructures as essential and largely irresistible tools of state power in the 1980s, today we are much more inclined to see them as terrifyingly expensive and dangerous. Bureaucracies and infrastructures now seem more accurately described as antagonists. Yet trust also builds infrastructures. Local charities set up the turnpike trusts that funded the regional roads in 18th century Britain, and two centuries later, highly centralised, privately owned financial partnerships – what Louis Brandeis called Money Trusts – in the US and Germany funded the development of large-scale high-voltage electrification infrastructures. Something similar is happening on the African continent, as users shelve their doubts about the monopoly firms responsible for the development of mobile networks to take advantage of coverage and network effects that break free, for the first time, of the gatekeeping state and roadblock governance. [Mann, Bogart, Hughes, Braun, Smith, Slack, Jones]
As Szreter shows, universal income support for the old was the most important part of the English poor law for 250 years before the utilitarian reforms of 1834. After the misery of the 19th century, the politicised pensions reforms of the Prussian Chancellor, Bismarck, in 1889 gave the state a powerful tool against revolutionary movements. These public pensions, funded by compulsory payments from workers and their employers, also strengthened family trust, as Anderson shows, in the 20th century because they transformed the elderly from unmanageable burdens of the responsible young to the most reliable source of income for extended families. Everywhere these public contributory pensions – in countries as diverse as Brazil, Germany and China – now confront a daunting demographic problem as the number of contributing workers begins to fall below the level required to fund the income of retirees. These tricky pension equations frame questions of migration and of xenophobia for all of these countries. Most South Africans, and the very poor on the African continent, receive non-contributory pensions funded by the fiscus. But there has been a similar dramatic change in the form of private pensions, especially since the end of the Apartheid era. South Africans followed the US corporate turn away from defined benefit pensions, which required employers to fund, insure and manage pension funds that would pay retirees a proportion of their final wage in perpetuity, to defined contribution funds that are entirely privately owned by the employees. Private pensions have changed from being instruments of inter-generational dependence in the work place to purely individualised, selfish resources. The Government Employees Pension Fund in South Africa is a very good example of this kind of fully-funded privately owned retirement resource. As Braun shows, the turn to fully-funded, privately owned pensions managed by trusts has built up huge surpluses of unproductive investment and accelerated the movement to primarily financialised economies.
This lecture examines the claim that the insatiable attention-mining of digital advertising, derived particularly from social media, has fostered the collapse of trust in professional experts, statistical authority and the media. The long history of muckraking journalism should make us wary of this claim, at least at face value. Newspapers have long attracted audiences by regaling their customers with gory stories of corruption. Perkin’s careful history of the professions suggests a different timing for their prestige and its decline. So too, Porter’s study of the importance of democratic conflicts in the rise of statistical authority over professional prestige suggests that we need to be careful about a single explanation for the two trajectories. At least since Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, social scientists of many different flavours have worked to open the toolboxes and puncture the political prestige of experts of all kinds. Yet there is something undeniably novel and destructive for both professional knowledge and the statistical sciences in the scale and speed of the digital advertising infrastructures developed since 2009. In a political world of thin margins the effects of these infrastructures of mistrust seems to overwhelm the idea (which we have mainly from Norris) that meaningful democracy depends on an always vigilant, always skeptical electorate. Given the fact that the owners of the platforms are the wealthiest and most active political actors, reforms to the existing legal arrangements for on-line publishing – like removing the immunities under Section 230 of the US Communications Act or networks of fact-checkers, like Bellingcat and Rappler – are unlikely meaningfully to reverse or slow the momentum of mistrust. The social media economy puts liberal democracy itself at risk.
Programme for 2024
In this lecture series we aim to rework the fragmented scholarly accounts of trust into a general understanding that may strengthen institutions on the African continent. To date, the different geopolitical elements of trust have been treated as separate and autonomous domains. Examples of these discrete fields might include the potent conventions of legal equity that are applied to derivative financial instruments out of the City of London, the principles and practices of waqf in Islamic law, the professionalization that underpins trust in numbers, and the institutions and conventions of tribal trusts that control how many ordinary people access land on the African continent. Our hypothesis is that when they are examined together, as interdependent infrastructures, we will approach a new account that focuses on fiduciaries – delegated, regulated authorities (like the notaries in European civil law) – in the development and maintenance of trust.
We are very aware of the scope and complexity of the scholarship on trust, and we specifically request that you let us know if there is an important body of work that seems missing that we should consider in making these arguments.
The lectures will be hosted in hybrid format in the WISER Seminar room and on Zoom. Please register on Zoom in advance of the meetings in order to join us.
1. 14:00 - 15:00 Thursday, Feb 29 | What is Trust? | Keith Breckenridge
In this panel discussion we set out the main moments, preoccupations and curiosities of the existing scholarship on trust : the first part of this field extends from Simmel’s writing in the early 20th century, through Niklas Luhmann’s writings in German in the 1970s on social systems and to Herbert Frankel’s work on money a few years later. In general scholars seem to have had little interest in trust during the political and economic tumult of the 1960s and 1970s; curiously, the real explosion of interest dates from the boom years of the 1980s and 1990s as Fukuyama and many others began to identify a broad decline in the institutions of socialized trust. The new experimental, game theoretical interest in transactions (and their costs) was one major source of this interest. Less well understood was the economic historians’ and sociologists’ discovery of trust in the “economy of obligation” that grew with pervasive indebtedness in early modern England. The crisis of trust, then, was already a well-developed, if lopsided, area of research in the social sciences by the time that the global financial crisis and the rise of the outrage economy on social media began to trigger universal concern about the dismantling of institutional authority in democratic societies. [works to discuss: Carruthers, Fukuyama, Gambetta, Giddens, Hardin]
2. 14:00 Wednesday, March 27 | Trust in Africanist scholarship | Keith Breckenridge and Laura Phillips
Africanists have written insightfully on the fragile institutions of trust, and the pervasiveness of mistrust, in the societies of this continent. This work is typically ethnographic in its method, and it has produced explanations of the crisis of trust that differ markedly from the most influential accounts of northern scholarship. Some of the most recent work follows the Comaroffs in observing that the collapse of trust in the wealthiest societies signals a new tribalisation of the old imperial societies. [works to discuss : Carey, Ekeh, Geschiere, Hart, Monga, Shipton, Zeleza] Bibliography
3. 14:00 Thursday, April 25 | Trust in Islam | Keith Breckenridge and Ayesha Omar
Historians of the medieval law of trust have pointed to its origins in the religious obligations of waqf that the English crusaders brought home from Jerusalem in the 13th century. African lawyers have also pointed to the influence of Islam in the development of customary ideas about trusteeship in the inheritance of property. Specific instruments of trust – typically beyond the control of the state – have been important to the development of islamic institutions over a millennium, and to the success of the trading diasporas on the African continent. [works to discuss: Alpers, Bishara, Chirikure, Hofmeyr, Makdisi, Mcdow, Soares] Bibliography
4. 14:00 Thursday, May 30 | Equity, Finance and the Law of Trusts | Jonathan Klaaren and Keith Breckenridge
Social scientists’ interest in trust has been oddly handicapped by a failure to take the anglophone tradition of equity (the law of trusts and fiduciaries) seriously. This neglect is probably a consequence of the absence of the law of trusts in civil law societies (where regulated, but venal, public notaries take on much of the same work). This eschewal of research into trust law has coincided with an explosive resurrection in the fiduciary regulation of financial derivatives, private jurisdictions and the offshoring of tax obligations. The absence of scholarship on equity, partly, reflects its expulsion from South African law by the insistence on a Roman-Dutch tradition of indivisible (and individualized) property. [works to discuss: Chanock, Hudson, Lobban, Lui, Hayton, Palmer]
5. 15:00 Wednesday, July 3 | Politics of Tribal Trusts | Laura Phillips, Tara Weinberg, Khumisho Moguerane, Hlonipha Mokoena, and Keith Breckenridge
From the 1890s British missionaries and administrators began to argue that chiefs held all African land in trust, and that it could not be alienated or mortgaged. By the end of the British military occupation of the Transvaal in 1907, this model – with the colonial government assuming the role of the trustee – had become the dominant form of property for Africans in South Africa, empowering magistrates and then chiefs who controlled land allocation and use. The model traveled widely across the continent. One powerful consequence of this idea was the collapse, after the demise of the Glen Grey scheme, of land survey and registration in the reserved territories across the continent. Over time, and especially over the last generation, aristocrats and governments strengthened their claims to fiduciary control of the land without specifying beneficiaries, their rights or any rules of performance and regulation. [works to discuss: Ally, Braun, Capps, Chanock, Delius, Ekeh, Ekow Daniels, Lugard, Meek, Smuts]
6. Thursday, August 1, 15:00 | Critics of Trust | Keith Breckenridge and Laura Phillips
Some of the most insightful accounts of trust have come from those who deny its general usefulness. Carey, in particular, has pointed to the resourcefulness of mistrust in generating the flexibility and tolerance that resource-scarce societies require to endure – in this argument, general expectations of mistrust can generate the resilience that is often attributed to widespread trust. Other theorists of democracy, like Norris and Sztompka, have suggested that something like institutionalised distrust is an important constraint on the very likely abuses of the powerful -- and part of the scepticism and vigilance required in a meaningfully free society. For Gramsci and for Bourdieu, writing long before the social media upheavals, something recognisably like generalised trust underpins social capital as an effective tool of enduring class hierarchies. More recently, Weichselbraun et al have focused on the use of political arguments about building trust to foster invasive and burdensome technologies of audit, control and pacification. [works to discuss: Bourdieu, Gambetta, Carey, Gramsci, Jiménez, Mühlfried, Norris, Sztompka, Weichselbraun et al]
7. Thursday, August 29, 15:00 | Maitland on Trust and Equity | Keith Breckenridge, Efthimios Karayiannides and Laura Phillips
It was FW Maitland who first explained the importance of the trust form in English history, in an essay intended for perplexed German lawyers. Maitland was a chancery barrister, and, arguably, the first professional historian in the modern sense. He was also a professor, and responsible for teaching the curriculum on equity -- the English law of fiduciaries -- in the Law Tripos at Cambridge at the turn of the last century. In this lecture, we examine his account of the many forms of trust in English history and the main elements of his explanation of the origins and remarkable powers of equity. The lecture will also examine the connections between Maitland's account of trust and the simultaneous rise of the anti-trust movement in the United States, colonial policies derived from Henry Maine's theory of village economics and the South African rejection of the English law of trusted fiduciaries. [Authors to be discussed include Maitland, Breach, Kirby, Maine, Mantena, Runciman, Sklar]
8. Thursday, 26 September, 15:00 | Trust in computing | Keith Breckenridge and Faeeza Ballim
Universities, firms and governments routinely, and apparently universally, insist that computers, networks and input devices can be used to build trust – perhaps because these devices generate and exploit the statistical evidence that Porter has tracked as key to the ascendancy of numerical regulation. Yet, interestingly, as Donald Mackenzie has shown, computer scientists and mathematicians have a long history of bitter conflict over the reliability of mechanised computational reasoning. This principle – that computers, their networks and users should never be trusted – is close to the core argument of modern computer security, best demonstrated in Ross Anderson's life's work. Far from solving the problems of mistrust in computing and statistical evidence, the recent ascendancy of human-like deep-learning models intensifies these disputes within computer science, and in society, with particular regulatory problems on the African continent. Yet the same network arrangement -- as Schaffer and Shapin, Latour and Mackenzie's work on the Black-Scholes equation have all shown -- has supported a particular kind of experimental science, the automation and centralisation of decision-making and the expansion of scales that structure the world we now live in. [The lecture will focus on work by Mackenzie, Anderson, Domingos, Latour, Marwala, Schaffer, Shapin]
9. Thursday, October 31, 15:00 | Money as Trust | Keith Breckenridge and Laura Phillips
Trust, money and debt have been mutually constructed since the Shakespearean era. In the 20th century, it was trust in the motives and expertise of economists, and in government, that lay at the heart of Keynes’ insistence that spending could be managed to prevent cyclical recessions and unemployment. For the neoliberal economists who followed Simmel, especially the South African, Herbert Frankel, money was an instrument of trust precisely because it involved bargains formed without the state, and without political considerations. The liberals’ inflexible gold standard, especially for Polanyi, was the mainspring of the political crisis that led to Fascism. For Africans and Indians (and many others in the former colonial world) gold – Keynes’ “barbarous relic” – has long been a singular instrument for preserving the value of labour and the wealth of families in the face of persistent state attacks the value-preserving qualities of money. The argument -- most famously made by the mining engineer and US president, Herbert Hoover, in 1930: “We have gold because we can’t trust governments” – has been mobilised by the advocates of digital currencies in our own era. Yet these new currencies also offer states startling powers of surveillance and taxation over people and firms. [works to discuss: Ally, Balachandran, De Cecco, Hart, Frankel, Friedman, Keynes, Kwarteng, Polanyi, Prasad, Simmel, Tooze ]
Problems for 2025
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Trust in numbers
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Medieval Jewish merchants and the legal origins of institutional trust
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Trust in Infrastructure | Keith Breckenridge
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Trust in African economic history | Laura Phillips
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Classical theories of trust | Keith Breckenridge
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Disintermediation and lockin
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Professional trust
Bibliography:
Lecture 1 : What is Trust?
Lecture 2 : Trust in Africanist Scholarship
Bayart, Jean-Francois, The State in Africa: Politics of the Belly, Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2009.
Berman, Bruce, 'Ethnicity, Bureaucracy and Democracy: The Politics of Trust,' in B. Berman et al (eds) Ethnicity and Democracy in Africa, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2004, 38 - 53.
Berry, Sara, Chiefs know their boundaries: essays on property, power and the past, Asante, 1896-1996.Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2001.
Boone, Catherine, Property and Political Order in Africa: Land Rights and the Structure of Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Carey, Matthew, Mistrust. An Ethnographic Theory, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2017.
Ekeh, Peter, 'Colonialism and the Two Publics in Africa: A Theoretical Statement,' Comparative Studies in Society and History, 17, no. 1 (1975): 91 - 112.
Guyer, Jane. Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2004.
Hart, Keith,'Kinship, contract and trust: The economic organisation of migrants in an African city slum,' in D. Gambetta (ed.) Trust, Oxford: Blackwell, 1988: 176 - 193.
Monga, Celestin, Nihilisn and Negritude: Ways of Living in Africa, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016.
Rodney, Walter, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, London: Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications, 1972.
Shipton, Parker. The Nature of Entrustment: Intimacy, Exchange and the Sacred in Africa. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007.
Lecture 3 : The Trust in Islam