Towards a unified theory of Trust

2025 Unifying the theory of trust : Imperial law and biometric government

For the programme of lectures from the first year, please see this page.

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?

10. Thursday, Feb 27 : 14:00 | The foundational theories of trust : Maine, Simmel, Weber and Maitland

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.

11. Thursday, March 27, 14:00 | Trust in the Archive : the notarial tradition

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.

12. Thursday, April 24, 16:00 | Trump, the Paypal Mafia, the Bitcoin revolution and the geopolitics of digital money.

In his remarkable 2014 discussion with the anthropologist David Graeber, Peter Thiel agreed with his anarchist host about the key problems of contemporary capitalism : monopoly corporations like Google and Microsoft chasing rents for simple and now indispensable services, financial services luring the best engineers and scientists away from real innovation, freedom of action and imagination shackled by unconstrained rule-making and keeping. He spoke angrily about the impossibility of developing a payment system like Paypal in the US after the global financial crisis. Over the following decade Thiel changed his views. In the first year of the first Trump presidency he began to argue that Bitcoin was the “new world currency” that he had originally planned for Paypal. Offering the keynote to the 2022 annual Bitcoin conference in Miami, Thiel warned that the success of the digital currency had become a political question and called for a revolutionary youth movement against the gerontocracy of “woke” finance and ESG. This was before Terra Luna collapse, the global scandals around the insider trading at FTX and the prosecutions that followed from Gary Gensler’s office at the Securities and Exchange Commission. Yet, by the elections of October 2024, massive Bitcoin lobbying had effectively captured both parties – with the Harris campaign promising to fire Gensler. While much is still opaque about the Paypal Mafia’s alliance with the newly elected US president, it is certainly now clear that the election marks the overthrow of the regulatory constraints on Bitcoin in particular. (Other digital currencies have not been so lucky). The list is already long : closure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the debanking investigations, David Sacks’ promise to declare digital coins commodities (and not securities), the establishment of a Federal Crypto Reserve, the Trump families’ memecoins and new investments in exchanges and mining companies and the prohibition of a Federal Reserve digital currency. The Trump presidency marks the ascendance of the political movement that Thiel announced in 2022, with powerful likely effects on the post-Bretton Woods order and global economics. In this lecture, we examine the drivers of this change in the history and afterlives of the Paypal mafia, and consider the implications for a global economy partly shaped by the Financial Action Task Force, Open Banking, Open Finance and, especially, the Central Bank Digital Currencies being championed by the Chinese government.

13. Tuesday, July 1, 16:00 | Trust in the origins of capitalism 

Drawing on work that Simon Szreter has been doing for the last fifteen years, this lecture examines the institutions and effects of the English 17th century poor law, and asks whether an expansive redistributive welfare infrastructure is an essential determinant of trust. Confidence that the local welfare state and local philanthropies would provide life-saving support seems to have been required for the forms of risk-taking livelihoods that underpinned the origins of capitalist growth in 17th century England. 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. As Szreter has shown, 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.  The poor law and charitable trusts were responsible for relieving poverty and a host of other local responsibilities, including schools, hospitals and road building. It was this redistributive engine that fostered distinctive forms of mobility and transport, 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.

14.  Thursday, July 31, 16:00 | Trust in Infrastructure

As South Africans know well, mistrust 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 doubt 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 of many kinds and systematic 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 the most infuential social scientists, like Paul Edwards and Michael Mann, wrote confidently about infrastructures as essential and largely irresistible tools of state power and knowledge systems in the 1990s, today we are much more inclined to see them as terrifyingly expensive and dangerous. Bureaucracies and infrastructures, at least outside of China, are commonly described as bitter antagonists. Yet trust -- in the narrow financial sense -- also builds infrastructures. Local charities set up the turnpike trusts that funded the regional roads in 18th century Britain.  A century later, it was the highly centralised, privately owned financial partnerships – what Louis Brandeis called Money Trusts – in the US and Germany that funded and designed the development of large-scale rail and high-voltage electrification infrastructures. Something similar seems to be happening on the African continent, as states and users shelve their doubts about the monopoly firms responsible for the development of mobile, digital infrastructures to take advantage of coverage and monetary network effects that promise to break free, for the first time, of the gatekeeping state and roadblock governance. 

15. Thursday, August 28, 15:00 | Data Trusts and the Open Data Movement

Over the last five years, the idea that stronger legal specification of Data Trusts and Data Fiduciaries could address the risks of data exposure has gained significant traction. Advocates hope these frameworks will provide more robust protection of privacy both against powerful technology platforms and expanding state and donor interests in digital public infrastructure and open banking. These arguments have been advanced by Tim Berners-Lee’s Open Data Institute, by the European Union’s Data Governance Act (2022), and—most importantly for African countries—by India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act (2023). Each of these initiatives rests on the idea that the fiduciary duty to protect the interests of beneficiaries (well established in Trust Law) can be extended to vast pools of data. The goal is both to limit the exploitation of personal information by firms and to provide data subjects with more meaningful control. Yet many problems remain with this approach, even in societies that apply equity law to trusts and fiduciaries. The optimistic but vague specification of fiduciary duties in the emerging field of data exchange—especially in relation to digital public infrastructure and open data—may simply divert attention from the more intractable problems of data exposure and control. For South Africans, and for others on this continent, the proposal risks adding yet another precarious layer of trust to an already chaotic and ineffective system of regulation.

16. Thursday, September 25, 14:00 | Social media, social science and the collapse of public confidence in the professions, the media and statistics 

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.

17. Thursday, October 30, 14:00 | Medieval Jewish merchants and the religious origins of trust law

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.

18. Thursday, November 27, 16:00 |  Mistrusting the Future : universal contributory, defined benefit and defined contribution pensions

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.