Towards a unified theory of Trust

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]

Bibliography

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

• Trust in numbers

• Medieval Jewish merchants and the legal origins of institutional trust

• Trust in Infrastructure |  Keith Breckenridge

• Trust in African economic history | Laura Phillips

• Classical theories of trust | Keith Breckenridge

• Disintermediation and lockin

• Professional trust

Bibliography:

Lecture 1 :  What is Trust?