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This book is the product of two deep concerns. The first is my longstanding
academic interest in the political philosophy of John Locke, and in particular
his theory of trust, which was a central theme in his Two Treatises of Government
(1689). Locke appears in every chapter of this book and in a certain sense is its
central figure. The second, more recent concern has been the unprecedented
loss of trust, both in Britain and the United States, during the first two decades
of the twenty-first century. That loss of trust, especially in political institutions,
reached crisis proportions between 2016 and 2020, the years during which I wrote
this book. Those years witnessed the presidency of Donald Trump in the United
States, the debate on the terms of the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from
the European Union, and the devastating coronavirus pandemic of 2020 in both
countries.
There is a broad consensus today that trust in other people, institutions, and
political systems is in steep decline. Journalists and pundits regularly lament the
loss of trust in government and corporations. Polling agencies like Gallup and the
Pew Research Center in the United States and British Social Attitudes in Britain
provide statistical evidence that all forms of trust are in decline. Practical self-help
books, recognizing what journalists and polls have been telling us, have flooded
the market with strategies of how to develop or restore trust in family members,
neighbors, and co-workers. We are clearly in the midst of a multi-faceted crisis of
trust that threatens the social and the political order.
There has been a substantial body of academic literature on the subject of trust
in the last three decades. Much of that work deals mainly with loss of trust in
government, especially in Western democracies. The lion’s share of this academic
literature has been written by social scientists, social and political theorists, and
philosophers. Somewhat surprisingly, there has been very little historical work on
the subject. There has been, as of this writing, only one comprehensive history of
trust and a handful of more specialized studies that adopt a genuinely historical
approach to the subject. This book is an effort to redress that historical neglect. It
focuses on the early modern period, which stretches roughly from the early
sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century, and it deals almost exclu-
sively with England, Scotland, and colonial America. It does, however, look back
briefly at the medieval period and forward to the nineteenth and twentieth centu-
ries, and it concludes with a chapter on the loss of trust in public institutions in
the United States and to a lesser extent Britain in the late twentieth and early
Distrust of Institutions in Early Modern Britain and America. Brian P. Levack, Oxford University Press.
© Brian P. Levack 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192847409.003.0001
       
twenty-first centuries. As the title of the book indicates, it deals mainly with distrust
in institutions rather than persons.
One reason for the failure of most of the academic literature on trust to study
its historical dimension is the assumption that because trust exists in all societies,
there is little reason to explore the different historical contexts in which it has

found expression. This assumption works against a genuinely historical approach
to the subject, and many books and articles that make passing reference to trust
or distrust in the past do so only to support theories based on empirical social
scientific research. When non-historians refer to trust in the past, they often make
facile distinctions between trust in “traditional” or “premodern” and modern
societies, without understanding how complex those earlier societies were and
the different manifestations of trust or distrust that found expression in them.
These scholars also fail to deal with changes in the granting or withholding of
trust in periods of fundamental if not unprecedented historical change. The most
they do is associate changes in expressions of trust with the emergence of “moder-
nity” without defining that amorphous term.
While trust has always been considered an important, if not essential, dimen-
sion of personal, private relationships, its application to the public sphere, where
it is given to, or withheld from, political, financial, legal, and ecclesiastical institu-
tions, has a significant historical dimension. The main argument of this book is
that distrust of central governments, national banks, corporations, law courts, and
established churches arose in England and colonial America between 1500 and
1800. During those years contemporaries began to understand that institutional
trust was just as essential for the maintenance of public order as personal trust was
for maintaining the social order. Maintaining trust in the people who staffed large
public institutions, however, was much more challenging than trusting people who
were personally known to their neighbors in local communities. The people who
staffed those institutions are the strangers in this book. Those strangers should not
be confused with the people personally unknown to each other who engaged in
trade with each other and between whom a low level of mutually beneficial trust
was necessary for the success of a market economy. Nor should they be identified
with the people in our communities we never met but in whom “generalized” trust
is often considered commendable.¹ The strangers in this book are the men and
women who ran large public institutions who were personally unknown to the
vast majority of people whom they governed, controlled, or influenced.
¹ For the extensive contemporary literature on trusting strangers, see Karen S. Cook, Margaret
Levi, and Russell Hardin, eds., Whom Can We Trust? How Groups, Networks, and Institutions Make
Trust Possible (New York, 2009), Introduction. On the positive aspects of trusting strangers see Ute
Frevert, The Moral Economy of Trust: Modern Trajectories (London, 2014); James Vernon, Distant
Strangers: How Britain Became Modern (Berkeley, 2014);Penelope Gwynn Ismay, Trust among
Strangers: Friendly Societies in Modern Britain (Cambridge, 2018); Paul Seabright, The Company of
Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life, 2nd ed. (Princeton, 2010); Eric M. Uslaner, The Moral
Foundations of Trust (Cambridge, 2002).
 
I define an institution in the traditional sense of an organization, establishment,

or bureaucratic structure governed by rules and procedures for the purpose of
implementing certain policies or programs. This book is concerned only with for-
mal institutions, not those that regulate social behavior in communities of various
size. The institutions discussed in this book are also public institutions in that

they are either part of the state apparatus, such as government agencies, law
courts, and state churches, or operate in the public sphere, such as banks and
corporations.
Much of the modern academic literature on trust deals extensively with the
definition and theory of trust. This book is not intended as a critical commentary
on that literature. Nevertheless, I found it necessary, before beginning this histori-
cal study, to define trust, explain why I consider it more of an emotion or a senti-
ment than a rational calculation, consider to what extent it may be considered a
moral, civic, or social virtue, and evaluate the loss of freedom, the risks, and the
vulnerability it entails. Most important, this section on the theory of trust distin-
guishes between personal and institutional trust while at the same time illustrating
the rhetorical connections between them. I restrict my discussion of trust theory
to the first half of Chapter 1, which is titled “Trust, Distrust, and History.” The
second half of that chapter traces the gradual emergence of institutional distrust in
England prior to 1660. It was virtually unknown in the Middle Ages and became
explicit only during the reign of Charles I (1625–49). The centerpiece of this sec-
tion is a narrative of the growth of political distrust in the years leading up to the
revolution of the 1640s. I also discuss the growth of distrust in legal, commercial,
and ecclesiastical institutions during this period, mainly to show its connection
with the dominant political narrative. I provide a full discussion of distrust in these
non-political institutions, which became more explicit and multifaceted in the late
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in Chapters 3, 4, and 5 respectively.
Chapter 2, “John Locke and Trust of Government,” begins with a discussion of
the political philosophy of Locke, who claimed that all government is, or at least
should be, based on trust. The chapter shows how his theory originated in oppo-
sition to the governments of Charles II and James II, which Locke claimed vio-
lated the trust that the people had placed in the executive and the legislature. The
chapter then shows how Locke’s argument provided a foundation for opposition
to the Whig ministries of the early eighteenth century and colonial American
opposition to the British government in the 1760s and 1770s. The concluding sec-
tion in this chapter deals with efforts to promote mutual trust between the gov-
ernment and the people in drafting the United States Constitution in 1787 and
the Bill of Rights in 1789.
Distrust of the central government was closely related to that of legal institu-
tions, which is the subject of Chapter 3. A lack of confidence in English law courts
arose fairly early, mainly because of the corruption of justice in the late fifteenth
and early sixteenth centuries. Reforms undertaken by the governments of Henry
       
VII and Henry VIII helped to restore trust in the legal process, but distrust arose
once again during the personal rule of Charles I and among law reformers in the
1640s and 1650s, who demanded, among other things, the decentralization of
the law courts at Westminster, the abolition of the Court of Chancery, and the
right of juries to acquit defendants in criminal trials on the grounds that the law

was unjust. Distrust of English law courts reached a peak in the late seventeenth
century in reaction to the coercion of juries and the violation of defendants’ rights
in trials of Whigs and religious dissenters. Another source of judicial distrust in
late seventeenth-century England and the early American republic were the pro-
cedures in treason trials, which resulted in the unfair prosecution of opponents of
the government. The harshness and unfairness of punishments for all crimes also
eroded faith in the entire criminal justice system both in Britain and in America
during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
The establishment of the Bank of England and the growth of the stock market
in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were the main sources of
distrust in British financial and commercial institutions, which is the subject of
Chapter 4. That distrust reached a peak in the South Sea Bubble of 1720, the
greatest financial scandal in British history, which led to a loss of trust in the gov-
ernment itself as well as in the large stock companies that made profits from the
scheme. Distrust of national banks later became a recurrent source of distrust in
the United States, which led to the failure of the first two national banks and pre-
vented a third from being established until the creation of the Federal Reserve
System in 1913. Distrust of the system of taxation in Britain focused mainly on
excise taxes, which the government was in large part successful in managing by
the middle of the eighteenth century, whereas excise taxes, direct taxes, and cus-
toms duties levied on American colonists became a major source of colonial dis-
trust of the British government in the 1760s and 1770s. This chapter also deals
with the formation of legal trusts, which are transfers of property from one party
to another, who holds the property “in trust” for a beneficiary. The only distrust
of this system in early modern England came from the royal government when
landed families used trusts to avoid paying taxes in the 1530s.
Chapter 5, on distrust of ecclesiastical institutions, deals with two separate
developments that caused a loss of trust in established churches in England,
Scotland, and America. The first was a long tradition of anticlericalism in
England, which played a role in that country’s break with the Roman Catholic
Church and the state’s assumption of complete control of the Church in the 1530s.
A new wave of anticlerical sentiment during the archiepiscopate of Archbishop
William Laud in the 1630s led to the disestablishment of the English Church in
1646, and shortly thereafter it caused the collapse of the Presbyterian form of
church government that briefly replaced it. After the Restoration, mutual distrust
and outright conflict arose between the Church of England and the dissenting
Protestant sects. A reluctant toleration of those dissenters in England in 1689 and
 
episcopalian dissenters in Presbyterian Scotland in 1712 failed to dissipate much

of that distrust, leaving the established churches of both nations permanently
weakened. In America, distrust of established churches of different denomina-
tions resulted in the separation of church and state in the federal government and
the disestablishment of all churches in the individual states by 1818.

The final chapter, “The Crisis of Institutional Trust, 1970–2020,” surveys the
growing loss of trust in British and American political, legal, financial, commer-
cial, and ecclesiastical institutions during the past few decades. The chapter
compares the loss of trust in the early modern period with that of the recent past,
recognizing the much larger number and greater complexity of present-day
institutions. It also discusses, for the first time in the book, distrust of the media,
especially the news media, which were in their infancy in seventeenth-century
England. The section on the media leads into a discussion of the Trump adminis-
tration’s distrust of fact-based bodies of knowledge, especially science, and its
broader war against truth itself. These claims against factual knowledge recall the
culture wars of the early modern period, which featured debates on the utility of
science and also the nature of truth, which the common sense philosophers of the
eighteenth century contended was the main condition for trusting other people.
The conclusion identifies four general sources of institutional distrust in both
the early modern period and the recent past: abuse of power, corruption, ideol-
ogy, and anti-elitism. The conclusion also identifies the strategies governments in
Britain and America have used to cultivate trust among the citizenry. The key to
their success in those relatively infrequent periods of high institutional trust was
the implementation of policies that were transparent and were administered
fairly, consistently, and efficiently.
I have written this book in the hope that it will appeal to two very different
audiences. The first are academics—mainly historians but also the social scien-
tists and philosophers who have written most of the theoretical literature on the
subject of trust in the past thirty years. The inclusion of footnotes and bibliogra-
phy is almost entirely for their use. The second audience is an amorphous group
of general readers who have an interest in early modern British and American
history. To make the book as accessible as possible to those potential readers, I have
avoided the discussion of historiographical debates, limited the number of
footnotes, and tried, wherever possible, to simplify legal, economic, and religious
complexities. For their benefit I have also provided some basic historical back-
ground material with which academic historians are already familiar.
1
Trust, Distrust, and History

In the past few decades, trust has become an increasingly frequent subject of
popular and academic discourse. Much of this discussion deals with the recent
decline or loss of interpersonal trust—the trust we have in other people. We have,
it seems, become a much less trusting society than in the past. The loss of trust
has also affected public institutions, most notably national governments, but also
law courts, banks, corporations, churches, the media, and educational institutions.
In some instances distrust of institutions has led to a loss of trust in entire politi-
cal, economic, and legal systems. Much has been written of this recent “crisis” of
institutional distrust, but its chronological parameters have been limited to the
last few decades. This book offers a much broader historical view of the crisis.
While trust has been the subject of a substantial academic literature since the
1970s, very little of it has explored the history of the concept of trust or changes in
its nature in different historical periods.¹ There are two main reasons for this his-
torical neglect. The first is an assumption, mainly among social scientists but also to
a lesser extent among philosophers, that because trust exists in all societies, there
is little reason to explore the different historical contexts in which it has found
expression. This assumption works against a genuinely historical approach to the
subject, and it accommodates specific historical examples of trust or distrust in
the past only to support theoretical or social scientific models. The other reason is
that when scholars make an effort to give a historical dimension to the subject,
they often make facile distinctions between trust in “traditional” or “premodern”
and modern societies, without understanding how complex those earlier societies
were and the different expressions of trust in those eras. These scholars also fail to
deal with changes in the granting or withholding of trust in periods of fundamental
if not unprecedented historical change, and they often disagree on what consti-
tutes modernity.²
This book is concerned mainly with trust and distrust in public institutions in
Britain and North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These
¹ Noteworthy exceptions are Geoffrey Hosking, Trust: A History (Oxford, 2014); Ute Frevert, The
Moral Economy of Trust: Modern Trajectories (London, 2014); Craig Muldrew, The Economy of
Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (New York, 1998);
László Kontler and Mark Somos, eds., Trust and Happiness in the History of European Political Thought
(Leiden, 2018); Ian Forrest, Trustworthy Men: How Inequality and Faith Made the Medieval Church
(Princeton, 2018); Christian Morgner, “Trust and Confidence: History, Theory, and Socio-Political
Implications,” Human Studies, 36 (2013), pp. 509–13.
² See for example, Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 101–6.
, ,   
years witnessed an exponential growth of state power, revolutions in Britain and

America, the emergence of a global capitalist economy, fundamental changes in
criminal procedure, and structural ecclesiastical change. Although trust in insti-
tutions was not absent in earlier periods—most notably the period between 1200 and
1600—its scope was limited, mainly because central political, legal, economic,

and ecclesiastical institutions had limited interaction with local communities,
and expressions of trust or distrust in those institutions, if they occurred at all,
were sporadic and often implicit. All this changed during the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, when the issue of trust became the subject of written and
oral discourse. During those transformative years, the subject of personal or
social trust—the trust that people place in other individuals or members of small
groups—played an important role in the development of the new discourse on
institutional trust. Literary comments on personal trust, which abounded in the
early modern period, provided a vocabulary and a set of concerns that writers
applied to their treatment of trust in institutions. Just as important, expressions of
personal distrust by individuals within those institutions led ultimately to expres-
sions of distrust in the institutions themselves and in some cases in entire political,
legal, or economic systems. Even today, it is often difficult to separate trust in
public institutions from the individuals who lead or preside over them. For example,
it is one thing to distrust the current prime minister but quite another to distrust
the institution of Parliament or even the system of representative democracy
upon which the legitimacy of Parliament rests.
Theories of Trust
The word “trust” eludes precise definition, and the modern academic literature
presents a wide variety of efforts to capture its essence. Instead of preferring one
definition over another, I use the late medieval and early modern definition in
this book. Its meaning in those years was the placement of faith (fides) or confi-
dence (fiducia) in another person’s character, ability, knowledge, or reliability. That
definition is compatible with most of those offered by social scientists, political
theorists, and philosophers today. It is also sufficiently broad to accommodate
different senses of the word. While fides and fiducia share the same Latin root,
they bear different connotations. Confidence (fiducia) often refers to a person’s
ability or reliability, whereas faith (fides) is more appropriate in referring to that
person’s character or knowledge.³ These different connotations do not, however,
support the distinctions some modern scholars make between trust and confidence
³ In medieval usage fiducia may have also connoted a more active and stable form of trust than
fides. Morgner, “Trust and Confidence,” pp. 511–12.
       
or between trust on the one hand and both confidence and faith on the other.⁴
Those distinctions are of semantic interest, but they complicate the task of analyz-
ing the notion of trust both in the past and in the present.
Ever since the invention of printing, writers have recognized that trust, broadly
defined as faith or confidence in another person’s character, ability, knowledge, or

reliability, is a vital dimension, if not the essential glue, of all human relationships.
The seventeenth-century English clergyman Thomas South referred to mutual trust
as “the soul and spirit that animates and keeps up society,” while the Cromwellian
MP and ecclesiastical writer Sir Charles Wolseley wrote that “Trust is the first and
chief ground of all human converse.”⁵ In 1676 the philosopher John Locke wrote
that trust in other people was essential for the very existence of society; it was the
“vinculum societatis,” the bond of society.⁶ Seventeen years earlier, he had pro-
vided a philosophical basis for this insight when he wrote: “Men live upon trust.”⁷
Modern scholars agree with South, Wolseley, and Locke. Adam Seligman writes
that trust is an essential component of all enduring social relationships, a view
shared by the psychologist Erik Erickson.⁸ The philosopher Martin Hollis writes
that “Our dealings with friends and enemies, neighbours and strangers, depend on
it, whether in homes, streets, markets, seats of government or other arenas of civil
society . . . Could an economy progress beyond barter, or a society beyond mud huts,
unless people relied on one another to keep their promises? Without trust, social
life would be impossible.”⁹ Niklas Luhmann argues that not only social life but also
the workings of all complex political and economic institutions, government
bureaucracies, and monetary systems depend directly upon trust.¹⁰ In discussing
the role of trust in monetary systems, the German sociologist Georg Simmel refers
to the general trust that people have in each other, without which society would
disintegrate.¹¹ Trust is therefore necessary for maintaining the public as well as the
social order. The moral and political philosopher John Rawls holds that trust among
members of a reasonably just society and their trust in the social structures and
political institutions of that society are what keep society together.¹²
⁴ See for example Niklas Luhmann, “Familiarity, Confidence, Trust: Problems and Alternatives,”
in Trust: Making and Breaking Co-operative Relations, edited by Diego Gambetta (Oxford, 2000),
pp. 97–9; Barbara Misztal, Trust in Modern Societies (London, 1996), p.16; Adam B. Seligman, The
Problem of Trust (Princeton, 1977), pp. 16–22.
⁵ Sir Charles Wolseley, The Unreasonableness of Atheism (London,1675), p. 153.
⁶ John Locke, Essays on the Law of Nature, ed. W. von Leyden (Oxford, 1954), p. 212.
⁷ The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. E.S. de Beer, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1976), p. 123.
⁸ Seligman, The Problem of Trust, p. 13. Erikson claims that trust, which he argues develops in the
early years of a child’s life, is the foundation of all human relationships. Erikson, Childhood and Society
(New York, 1963), p. 249. For more recent discussions of infant trust see Baier, “Trust and Antitrust,”
pp. 241–4 and Marek Kohn, Trust: Self-Interest and the Common Good (Oxford, 2008), pp. 1–6.
⁹ Martin Hollis, Trust within Reason (Princeton, 1998).
¹⁰ Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power (New York, 1979), pp. 50, 69–70. On the importance of trust in
institutions see also Dóra Gyórffy, Institutional Trust and Economic Policy (Budapest, 2013), pp. 13–14.
¹¹ Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, tr. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (London, 1978),
pp. 187–9.
¹² John Rawls, “The Sense of Justice,” Philosophical Review,72 (1963), pp. 281–305.
, ,   
One indication of the importance of trust in social intercourse is the frequent

search for someone in whom one can confide. The assurance “Trust me,” often
spoken by parents, friends, or those claiming wisdom or knowledge the other
person reputedly does not have, provides an indication of its role as a prerequisite
of meaningful social interaction. Trust is essential in maintaining relationships

between spouses and between parents and children; it remains a necessary ingre-
dient in lasting friendships; and it extends to members of professions with whom
people have direct contact, such as doctors, clergymen, and lawyers.
The evil twin of trust is of course distrust. No matter how much we may want to
trust others, and however much we recognize the importance of trust in personal
relationships, we understand that trust is fragile and that it can be, and often is,
withheld, betrayed, violated, or lost. Distrust can shatter, sometimes irreparably,
the personal bonds that exist between spouses, family members, friends, and
colleagues. Its absence inhibits honesty and promotes suspicion, while its loss is a
source of much marital discord and the cause of many broken relationships. It is
therefore both a vital and a fragile social commodity. The word mistrust is some-
times used as a synonym for distrust, but distrust is the stronger term. Mistrust is
characterized more by suspicion of a person’s untrustworthiness than a feeling
that trust has been betrayed.
Trust can be placed in superiors, subordinates, or equals. Authorities or superi-
ors need subordinates to trust them, while at the same time they need to trust
their subordinates to carry out their wishes or orders. Subordinates need to trust
their superiors to provide guidance, leadership, and stability. It is more common
therefore for mutual trust to exist between parties that are significantly unequal
in power, resources, or autonomy than in egalitarian societies.¹³ But in all social
arrangements, regardless of whether they involve equal or unequal relationships,
the desideratum is mutual trust.
Trust, the Emotions, and Reason
I consider trust to be more of an emotion (or a feeling or sentiment) than a rational

assessment. In this I agree with Edmund Burke, who, taking his cue from eighteenth-
century Scottish common sense philosophers (Thomas Reid, Adam Ferguson, and
Dugald Stewart), referred to trust as a feeling.¹⁴ The seventeenth-century English
philosopher Thomas Hobbes said essentially the same thing in The Elements of
Law (1640), in which he defined trust as “a passion proceeding from a belief of
¹³ Kohn, Trust, p. 2.
¹⁴ On trust as a practice accompanied by feelings whether someone is good or reliable see Ralf-
Peter Fuchs, “Trust as a Concept of Religious Plurality during the Thirty Years’ War,” in Trust and
Happiness in the History of European Political Thought, edited by LászlóKontler and Mark Somos
(Leiden, 2018), p. 305.
       
him from whom we expect or hope for good.”¹⁵ The twentieth-century philosopher
Annette Baier agrees that trust and distrust are feelings, although by feelings she
means, as they did for David Hume, “feeling responses to how we take our situation
to be.”¹⁶ The sociologist Piotor Stzompka also emphasizes the emotional dimen-
sion of trust, arguing that it is a bet, and all bets have a significant emotional or

instinctive dimension, as any gambler knows.
To be sure, there is a rational dimension of trust, because, being future-
oriented, it involves expectations regarding the behavior or the performance of
the person being trusted. Such expectations are rational in that they are often
based on an analysis of past behavior or experience. According to this view a
decision to trust is essentially a matter of rational assessment and choice. We
should not, however, overemphasize the rational dimension of trust. Its limited
rationality is evident in oaths, promises, and vows, which are essentially requests
to be trusted.¹⁷ Rational calculation may figure in a person’s decision to make a
promise, but a feeling or an instinct that the other party can be trusted is usually
more determinative than an analysis of past behavior. Decisions to trust are often
based on inconclusive evidence. Wedding vows serve as an example of the pri-
macy of emotion in the expression of mutual trust.
There are very few terms that describe trust as both an emotion and a rational
assessment. The most useful one is “attitude” or “frame of mind,” which, however
vague, is more neutral than the more emotive “psychological state.”¹⁸ Karen Jones
uses “affective attitude” to encompass both the cognitive and emotional dimen-
sions of trust.¹⁹ Even vaguer than “attitude” is “relationship,” which is useful in
describing personal or social trust but not trust in institutions. I certainly have
trusting relationships with my family and friends, but to say that I have a trusting
relationship with the United States Supreme Court, the Catholic Church, or the
Boy Scouts of America, besides being no longer true, is a strained application of
the term from the private to the public sphere.
One theory that encompasses both the emotional and rational components of
trust is that all trusting relationships have a cognitive component, in which one
¹⁵ Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, ed. J.C.A. Gaskin (Oxford, 1994), p. 53.
In the same paragraph Hobbes equates “distrust” with diffidence or lack of confidence.
¹⁶ Annette Baier, “Trust,” in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, vol. 13, edited by
Grethe B. Pederson (Salt Lake City, 1992), pp. 111–12. The German historian Ute Frevert also views
trust mainly as an emotion. Frevert, Moral Economy of Trust, pp. 6–14.
¹⁷ Allan Silver, “Trust in Social and Political Theory,” in The Challenge of Social Control, edited by
G. Suttles and M. Zald (Norwood, 1985), p. 56. Baier, “Trust and Antitrust,” p. 245, argues that con-
tracts, like promises, also implicitly include an invitation to trust.
¹⁸ On trust as an attitude see Lars Herzberg, “On the Attitude of Trust,” Inquiry, 31 (1988),
pp. 307–22. For the psychological state see Denise M. Rousseau et al., “Not So Different after All: A
Cross-Discipline View of Trust,” Academy of Management Review,25 (1998), p. 395. Defining trust as a
psychological state, while not as strong as Hobbes’s “passion,” supports the definition of trust as an
emotion, while expectations based on the trustworthiness of others indicate its rational component.
¹⁹ Karen Jones, “Trust as an Affective Attitude,” Ethics, 197 (1996), pp. 5–6.
, ,   
rationally determines whether a person is trustworthy, and an affective component

based upon the emotional bond between the two parties.²⁰ This functionalist
theory leaves it to individuals as trusting agents to decide whether a prospective
trust situation meets their needs. This theory subsumes the emotional component of
trust, however strong or weak that bond might be, within the dominant rational

or cognitive component. It also assumes that the trusting parties can balance the
cognitive and emotional dimensions of a particular social relationship. One might
object that this assumption is based on an unrealistic degree of confidence in
people’s ability to achieve such a balance.
In an effort to identify the rational basis for trust and thus rescue reason from
the belief of some philosophers that trust grows fragile when people become too
rational, Martin Hollis has argued that reason, defined more broadly as rational-
ity, which prioritizes commitment to the common good can provide a practical
basis of trust.²¹ One objection to this theory is that trust is fragile because social
interactions are often indeterminate or uncertain, and trust offers a way of deal-
ing with such vagaries. In coping with such uncertainty, we usually act on the
basis of feeling or sentiment, not reason.²²
Trust and hope are closely related, in that they both have a significant emo-
tional component and both are future-oriented. But rationally based expectations
usually do not provide a basis for hope, as they sometimes do for trust; hope can
even assert itself against rational odds. The person who trusts another certainly
hopes for a happy outcome but may do so only after rationally weighing the risks.
The person who simply hopes ignores such contingencies.²³ Moreover, the
chronological framework for trust is limited, in that the person who trusts expects
the person trusted to behave in certain way within a period of time, whereas
hope, as the expression goes, springs eternal.
It is important to distinguish personal or social trust from trust in the opera-
tion of natural phenomena or the course of human events. When trust is based on
observable phenomena or reported events, such as when one expresses confi-
dence that the weather will be fair tomorrow or that civil war is likely to occur in
a foreign country, the emotional dimension of trust is minimized. Such expres-
sions of confident anticipation do not have a significant personal dimension, and
therefore, if they do not come to pass, there is no sense of betrayal, distrust, or
personal blame. The same can be said for trusting that one is well or trusting that
someone understands what has been said. Such propositional trust denotes
²⁰ Misztal, Trust in Modern Societies. See also J.D. Lewis and A. Weigert, “Trust as a Social Reality,”
Social Forces, 63 (1985), pp. 967–85. Lewis and Weigert add an instrumental or behavioral component
to trust.
²¹ Martin Hollis, Trust within Reason, ch. 1.
²² See Robert Sugden, “The Bond of Society: Reason or Sentiment?,” Critical Review of International
Social and Political Philosophy, 4 (2001), pp. 149–70.
²³ Luhmann, Trust and Power, p. 24.
       
confidence, but not in another’s person’s character, ability, knowledge, or reliability.

Also excluded from the category of personal or social trust is trust or confidence
in oneself or one’s judgment. When a person says “I don’t trust myself,” the admis-
sion of internal doubt is unlikely to have social implications. Another exclusion is
procedural trust, the confidence one places in a structure or process rather than

another person.²⁴
We should also distinguish between tacit trust in the exchange of goods, in the
law, and in universal moral principles and the explicit trust of individuals with
whom we have a personal relationship.²⁵ For example, trust in the value of cur-
rency used in commercial transactions or trust that murder is a morally wrong
commands much wider acceptance than trust in individuals to behave in a cer-
tain way. The kind of trust with which this book is concerned is the explicit trust
we place in people or institutions, not the acceptance of basic norms of moral,
legal, or economic conduct.
Trust in God
One form of trust that straddles the boundary between reason and emotion is trust
in God. Affirmations of such trust became common in England after the Bible,
which is central to Protestantism, was translated into English in the sixteenth
century. As the Oxford divine William Chillingworth wrote in 1638, “The Bible,
the Bible only I say, is the religion of Protestants.”²⁶ The Bible provided literate
English people (and those to whom they read aloud) with many texts, especially
in the Old Testament, which urged trust in God. Proverbs 16:20, for example,
assured the biblical reader that “Whoso trusteth in the Lord, happy is he,” while
Psalm 118:8 admonished the reader that “It is better to trust in the Lord than to
put confidence in man.”²⁷ Trust in God may be considered personal, but unlike
trust in other people, it is not mutual or reciprocal.
For Protestants, trust in God was also a central aspect of religious experience.
Protestant soteriology, first stated by Martin Luther but adopted with qualifica-
tions by most Protestant denominations, holds that salvation is based on faith
alone. Faith for Luther did not mean adherence to a body of religious doctrine, as
it did in medieval scholasticism. When Luther discussed doctrine, such as the
²⁴ G.T. Furlong, The Conflict Resolution Toolbox (Toronto, 2005), p. 143.

²⁵ Morgner, “Trust and Confidence,” p. 517.
²⁶ William Chillingworth, The Religion of Protestants (Oxford, 1638). Biblicism was just as essential
to Chillingworth, an Arminian suspected of Socinianism, as it was to his Calvinist critics.
²⁷ See also Psalm 40:3 (“He has put a new song in my mouth, praise unto our God; many shall see
it, and fear and will trust in the Lord”); Psalm 73:28 (“I have put my trust in the Lord God”); and
Proverbs 29:25 (“Whoever puts his trust in the Lord shall be safe”).
, ,   
belief in God’s existence, he used the Latin word credere, to believe.²⁸ In proclaiming
salvation by faith alone, however, Luther and his collaborator Philip Melanchthon
used the German word Glaube, which can be translated as either faith or trust.
The faith that Luther considered necessary for salvation was trust in Christ, who
had died for our sins. In Lutheranism that faith or trust is passive, because

Christians cannot do anything to gain salvation.²⁹ Luther’s reference in 1519 to
“the passive righteousness by which the merciful God justifies us by faith” rein-
forced this notion of faith as passive trust in God.
In early modern England the counterpoint to trust in the deity was the distrust
of the Devil, who had long been thought of as the Great Trickster and the con-
summate liar. This distrust made Protestants, especially Puritans, skeptical
regarding the validity of conversion experiences in which they thought they were
numbered among the elect and therefore predestined to eternal salvation. Distrust
of the Devil was also the source of the reluctance of the late seventeenth-century
New England Puritan minister Increase Mather to accept the validity of spectral
evidence—the claim that victims of witchcraft could see the witches who were
afflicting them—on the grounds that the Devil was believed to be impersonating
those alleged witches.³⁰
Trust, Virtue, and Morality
It is problematic to consider trust a virtue in the moral or ethical sense of the

word. Placing trust in someone does not reflect, positively or negatively, on the
character, integrity, or honesty of the trusting person. In that sense trust is morally
neutral. Trust, however, can be considered a virtue in the same way that loyalty,
sympathy, and empathy are considered virtues, or as Adam Smith labelled them,
“moral sentiments.”³¹ Moral sentimentalists hold that our emotions or feelings,
rather than reason, are the main source of moral knowledge and judgment. There
was a broad consensus in the early modern period that trust had a significant
moral dimension in that sense of the word. The eighteenth-century Scottish
moral philosopher Francis Hutcheson thought that we have an innate moral sense
that is rooted in our “passions and affections” and that trust was one of those
²⁸ See Ethan H. Shagan, The Birth of Modern Belief: Faith and Judgment from the Middle Ages to the
Enlightenment (Princeton, 2018), p. 65. Luther’s Latin text reads “credere deum,” an allusion to the
argument of the scholastic theologian Peter Lombard.
²⁹ Gérard Freyburger claims that fides has both and an active and a passive meaning. See Morgner,
“Trust and Confidence,” p. 512.
³⁰ Increase Mather, Cases of Conscience concerning Evil Spirits Personating Men (Boston, 1693),
p. 32.
³¹ Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 4th ed. (London, 1774). Smith argued that such
sentiments were “principles by which men naturally judge concerning the conduct and character of
their neighbours and afterwards of themselves” (title page).
       
passions. In his view “our nature itself leads us into friendship, trust and mutual
confidence.”³² Edmund Burke, who was strongly influenced by Hutcheson, held
that “ordinary feelings such as trust, though they may have a Christian correlative,
themselves supply sufficient groundwork of moral conduct.”³³
The strongest case for considering trust a moral virtue is to view it as a promise

that the person being trusted has a moral obligation to keep. Locke and Hume,
who agreed with Grotius that the obligation to fulfill promises was an element of
natural law, considered promise-keeping the foundation of a moral community.³⁴
Their emphasis on promise-keeping, however, raises the question whether we are
morally bound by any such obligation. It is certainly questionable, even today,
whether one is morally bound to keep one’s marital vows, or whether clergy who
take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience are morally bound to keep those
promises, especially when circumstances change. Russell Hardin, who considers
trust to be an expectation based on reason regarding the behavior of the person
being trusted, denies that there is any moral or ethical obligation to keep one’s
promises.³⁵ Likewise one can argue that contracts, which are formal mutual prom-
ises, do not prescribe any moral obligations, although they certainly entail legal
obligations. Eric Uslaner has argued that generalized trust—faith in people we
don’t know—gives trust a moral dimension.³⁶ It may be that people who exhibit
this type of “moralistic” trust are more likely to volunteer their time, give to charity,
and be tolerant of others, but there is no way to determine whether such general-
ized moral trust actually inspires their good works or tolerance of others.
A case might be made for trust as a civic virtue, as John Rawls has argued.³⁷
Civic virtue, which by definition applies only to political institutions, has for cen-
turies formed an essential part of republican ideology. It was promoted by Italian
Renaissance theorists, including Machiavelli, seventeenth-century English think-
ers such as James Harrington, and Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans in the
early nineteenth century.³⁸ But civic virtue, which is a commitment to the life of
³² Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue in Two
Treatises (London, 1725), treatise 2, 4.13. Hutcheson adapted the term “moral sense” from Locke’s
patron, the earl of Shaftesbury, who considered it a sense of what is right or wrong. Hutcheson, how-
ever, rejected Shaftesbury’s metaphysical belief that this moral sense reflected an immutable law
of nature.
³³ David Bromwich, The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke (Cambridge, MA, 2014), p. 15.
³⁴ See Seligman, The Problem of Trust, pp. 14–15. For a similar view, citing Cicero, see Steven
Shapin, A Social History of Truth (Chicago, 1994), p. 26.
³⁵ Russell Hardin, “Trusting Persons, Trusting Institutions,” in Strategy and Choice, edited by
Richard J. Zeckhauser (Cambridge, MA, 1991), p. 198. For a nuanced view of whether promises are
morally relevant and whether trust has a moral dimension see Annette Baier, “Trust and Antitrust,”
Ethics, 96 (1986), pp. 231–60.
³⁶ Eric M. Uslaner, The Moral Foundations of Trust (Cambridge, 2002). Uslaner does not argue that
trust itself is a virtue.
³⁷ John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York, 1993), p.163; Lawrence E. Mitchell, “Trust and the
Overlapping Consensus,” Columbia Law Review, 94 (1994), p.1920.
³⁸ J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic
Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975); Gordon Wood, “Classical Republicanism and the American
Revolution,” Chicago-Kent Law Review, 13 (1990), pp. 13–38.
, ,   
the political community, does not necessarily have a moral dimension. It can be
based on either ideology or rational self-interest, neither of which necessarily has
a moral component and in many cases does not. Rawls argues that one civic vir-
tue that can also be viewed as moral is tolerance, which is based upon respect for
individuals and other people. This classification suffers from an overly expansive

view of what constitutes morality. But even if we accept that view, there are prob-
lems in linking tolerance and the basic sense of fairness and justice shared by
members of society with trust in political institutions. It may serve as a statement
of Rawls’s ideals, but it can hardly serve as a universally held belief.³⁹
The classification of trust as a social virtue raises similar questions regarding the
moral foundation of trust. Social virtues include public spirit (hence an overlap
with civic virtue), neighborliness, honor, common decency, and mutual trust.⁴⁰
Once again, it is difficult to consider such virtues moral in the sense that they are
concerned with what is right or ethical. As Martin Hollis has argued, “They are not
straightforwardly moral notions in a sense approved by most moral philosophers.
They are neither abstract enough to be clearly universal nor uncontentious enough
in their claims to be virtues.”⁴¹ Hobbes thought that “justice, gratitude, modesty,
equity, and the rest of the laws of nature” were moral virtues, but he did not iden-
tify them as social virtues, even though they contributed to “sociable and comfort-
able living.”⁴² In a study of trust in modern economic life, the political economist
Francis Fukuyama makes a case for the importance of social virtues in corpora-
tions. In Fukuyama’s view, these virtues, which he labels “traditional” as opposed
to modern, have a moral dimension, and at one point he argues that trust arises
when a community shares a set of moral values.⁴³ To be sure, there are today
“moral communities” consisting of groups of people—often members of religious
denominations—who share a set of moral values. But there is no evidence that the
corporations that manifest Fukuyama’s social virtues are moral communities.
A much stronger case can be made for trustworthiness as a moral virtue,
because a person can be trusted because of his or her personal integrity. Indeed,
trust is defined as faith in another person’s character, especially that person’s
³⁹ See Mitchell, “Trust and the Overlapping Consensus,” pp. 19–25.

⁴⁰ Annette Baier refers to moral principles only as guidance for people asking others to trust them.
Baier, “Trust,” pp. 123–4. See also Thomas Scanlon, “Promises and Practices,” Philosophy and Public
Affairs,19 (1990), pp. 199–226.
⁴¹ Hollis, Trust within Reason, p. 4. Honor, for example, is a powerful “social adhesive” that often
sanctions morally questionable conduct.
⁴² Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 80 [ch. 15, para. 40]. Whether these moral virtues were also laws of nature,
as Hobbes claims in this paragraph, is a matter of scholarly debate. See Donald Rutherford, “Hobbes
on Moral Virtue and the Laws of Nature,” in The Battle of the Gods and Giants Redux: Central Themes
in Early Modern Philosophy, edited by Patricia Easton (Leiden, 2015), pp. 217–45; David Boonin-Vail,
Thomas Hobbes and the Science of Moral Virtue (Cambridge, 1994). In Leviathan, p. 73 [ch. 15, para. 7]
Hobbes classifies justice, defined as “keeping of covenant,” as a law of nature.
⁴³ Francis Fukuyama, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (London, 1969),
pp. 153–5. Samuel Bowles, The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives Are No Substitute for Good Citizens
(New Haven, 2016), supports Fukuyama’s argument that policies and business practices that ignore the
moral side of human nature often fail, but he does not contend that those practices include trust.
       
honesty or truthfulness. Locke considered trustworthiness as “the constitutive

virtue of, and the key causal precondition for the existence of, any society.”⁴⁴ The
Scottish common sense philosophers thought that the social order was predicated
upon trust in other peoples’ truthfulness.⁴⁵ But trustworthiness can also be based
on reliability, which need not have a moral dimension. It would stretch the defini-

tion of virtue and morality to consider the reliability of a gangster to murder
someone when a mob boss trusted him to do so as virtuous. But in communities
that subscribe to moral values, trustworthiness certainly has a moral dimension,
and it also serves important social and economic ends. In ancient Rome trust-
worthiness was viewed primarily as an indication of high social status, while in
early modern England the trustworthiness of one’s neighbors was the basis of
their reputation and consequently their reliability in economic transactions.⁴⁶
It is not always easy to determine trustworthiness, for a person can pretend to be
trustworthy. One way to unmask such pretense is to ascertain whether the person
is truthful. In the case of Donald Trump, who has serious issues of trustworthi-
ness, the Washington Post recorded more than 20,000 lies or misleading statements
while president, and the most consequential one, described by his opponents as
the Big Lie, was his baseless claim that the election of Joseph Biden in 2020 was
due to fraud. Another test of genuine trustworthiness is whether a person can
laugh, especially at oneself. Although smiling might conceal untrustworthiness,
an inability or unwillingness to laugh is a mark of untrustworthiness.⁴⁷ In this
connection it is noteworthy that Donald Trump often smiles or smirks but rarely
if ever laughs, and never at himself.
Trust and Freedom
Placing one’s faith or confidence in another person’s knowledge, ability, or judg-

ment involves a surrender, or at least a temporary suspension, of one’s freedom or
autonomy. A simple example from everyday life is that when we take public trans-
port, we place our confidence (fiducia) in the professional skill of the pilot or
⁴⁴ John Dunn, “The Concept of ‘Trust’ in the Politics of John Locke,” in Philosophy and History,
edited by Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneerewind, and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, 1984), p. 287. Russell
Hardin makes the important point that much of the modern academic literature on trust mistakenly
focuses on trust rather than trustworthiness. Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness (New York, 2002), ch.
2, esp. p. 28.
⁴⁵ Shapin, A Social History of Truth, p. 12. The modern philosopher Lars Herzberg comes close to
endorsing this position by stating that “when I trust someone, he as it were embodies goodness, or
reason for me.” Herzberg, “On the Attitude of Trust,” p. 315. See also Frevert, Moral Economy of
Trust, p. 33.
⁴⁶ Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation, ch. 6. Social status was also the basis for the trustworthi-
ness of the peasant elites in medieval English parishes upon whom bishops relied for information.
Forrest, Trustworthy Men, pp. 24–31.
⁴⁷ Paul Seabright, The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life, 2nd ed.
(Princeton, 2010).
, ,   
driver to get us to our destination. Of course, we also place trust in the reliability
of the transport vehicle itself, but the reliability of technology falls outside the
definition of interpersonal trust.⁴⁸ “Leave it to the experts” is another rhetorical
way of expressing a similar placement of trust or confidence in other people’s pre-
sumed superior knowledge or competence, as is our placement of trust in doctors

to cure our illnesses or in climate scientists when they predict what will happen if
the temperature of the Earth rises more than two degrees Celsius. Parents’ plea
for a child to trust them represents a more familiar domestic version of the same
dynamic. Early modern Europeans were aware of the loss of freedom that trust
could entail. Sir Walter Raleigh warned that entrusting one’s estate to a friend or
servant carried the risk of making one a “bond-slave” to the trustee and placed
him at his mercy. Placing one’s trust in God, which was central to Martin Luther’s
doctrine of salvation by faith alone, meant placing one’s own quest for eternal life
in the hands of the deity. Luther claimed that in matters of salvation a person has
no freedom of the will.
One beneficial effect of no longer relying on one’s own skill, knowledge, ability,
or activity is that it frees us from the responsibility of dealing with an issue our-
selves. The peace that apparently came over Luther when he realized that he no
longer had to perform good works to be saved is one historical manifestation of
the psychic relief that accompanies trust. In all such cases, the trusting person
surrenders his or her intellectual or practical autonomy and may even consider
oneself no longer responsible for his or her actions. But the intellectual liberation
or relief that may come from trusting others—whether they be superiors, experts,
or skilled practitioners—can lead to the negative feeling of distrust, as when we
distrust airplane pilots when we learn that some of them drink or sleep on the
job, military experts when they make strategic or tactical blunders, or doctors
when they misdiagnose illnesses or prescribe the wrong medications.⁴⁹ This same
problem of distrust plagues the political and financial officials in whom we place
our trust, as is so often the case today.
Trust always involves risk, which can be either great or small.⁵⁰ One possible
explanation why we take such risks is that trust simplifies life, that is, it reduces
social complexity.⁵¹ The danger of risk, however, in addition to the social
⁴⁸ The claim that the founders of the large Silicon Valley technology companies won “immense
public trust in their emergent technologies” is also a statement of trust in technology rather than the
founders themselves. New York Review of Books, April 5, 2018, p. 33. The question whether we can
trust artificial intelligence also lies outside the purview of this study, which deals only with trust in
people. See Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis, “Build A. I. We Can Trust,” New York Times, Sept. 9, 2019.
⁴⁹ On the complex issue of establishing trust in doctors and medicine see Onora O’Neill, Autonomy
and Trust in Bioethics (Cambridge, 2002).
⁵⁰ See Margaret Levi, “State of Trust,” in Trust and Governance, edited by Valerie Braithwaite and
Margaret Levi (New York, 1998), p. 79. Niklas Luhmann, “Familiarity, Confidence, Trust,” p. 100.
Susan P. Shapiro, “Policing Trust,” in Private Policing, edited by C. D. Shearing and P.C. Stenning
(Newbury Park, 1987) has called risk the essence of trust.
⁵¹ Luhmann, Trust and Power, p. 71.
       
subordination that Raleigh feared, is that if we abdicate a measure of our autonomy

by trusting someone else, we risk that person’s failure and consequently our harm.
If we trust a subordinate to follow orders or behave in a certain way, we risk non-
compliance or disobedience and therefore failure to achieve a desired result. Annette
Baier has identified the various “vulnerabilities” involved in trusting other people.⁵²

The classic illustration of such vulnerability is the risk of treason in someone we
trust. Queen Elizabeth I recognized this vulnerability in her speech to a parlia-
mentary deputation in 1586, saying that “I have found treason in trust,” while a
century later John Dryden wrote, “Treason is there in its most horrid shape where
trust is greatest.”⁵³
Trusting Institutions
Most of the literature on trust, including this book, distinguishes between trust in
persons and trust in institutions. Most writers on the subject also agree that it is
more difficult to establish trust in institutions, especially the large public institu-
tions that are the subject of this book, than among people in local communities.
The main reason for this difficulty is that the officials who staff central institutions
are “strangers” to members of the general population, lacking the familiarity that
is essential to building trust relationships.⁵⁴ There is no possibility that “thick
trust”—the strong personal trust that often develops among people in local com-
munities who have frequent contact with each other—can be established between
the general population and these institutional strangers. The most that can be
achieved is “thin trust,” the type of trust that exists between trading partners who
do not know each other personally. Thin trust is based on the fact that each party
can offer advantages to each other.⁵⁵ Such reciprocity, however, is more difficult to
establish between the public and the officials who staff large institutions. For that
reason trust in institutions is always more tenuous than it is between trading
partners, and it can more easily devolve into distrust. Only in small republics like
Renaissance Florence, where most people had at least some personal knowledge
of their rulers, was the gap between public and private and thus between thick
and thin trust navigable.⁵⁶
⁵² Baier, “Trust,” pp. 107–74. See in particular Baier’s analysis of John Updike’s story Trust Me,
pp. 115–16.
⁵³ John Baron Somers, A Second Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts(London, 1750), p. 67;
John Dryden, All for Love, or The World Well Lost (1678), 4.1.543–6.
⁵⁴ On the relationship between familiarity and trust see Luhmann, Trust and Power, ch. 3 and
“Familiarity, Confidence, Trust.”
⁵⁵ On thick and thin trust and reciprocity in trust relationships see Robert D. Putnam, Bowling
Alone (New York 2000), pp. 136–7.
⁵⁶ Edward Muir, “In Some Neighbors We Trust: On the Exclusion of Women from the Public in
Renaissance Italy,” in Florence and Beyond: Culture, Society and Politics in Renaissance Italy, Essays in
Honour of John M. Najemy, edited by David S. Peterson and Daniel E. Bornstein (Toronto, 2008), 280–2.
, ,   
Trusting public institutions also involves a greater surrender of autonomy and

control than trusting people with whom we have a personal relationship and
who therefore can more readily be held accountable if they should violate or
betray that trust. By the same token, the remoteness and impersonality of large
public institutions make it more difficult for the institutions to restore popular

trust once they have lost it. Witness, for example, the difficulty Wells Fargo,
Toyota, Volkswagen, Facebook, Penn State University, and the United States
Olympic Committee have had restoring trust as a result of defrauding customers,
selling defective products, or tolerating sexual misconduct. As Mark Zuckerberg,
the CEO of Facebook, said during a five-hour grilling by Congress in October
2019, “We certainly have work to do to build trust.”⁵⁷ Leaders of other institutions
have also declared their intention to regain popular trust in their companies, but
that restoration has been slow in coming.⁵⁸
Sometimes the remoteness and impersonality of institutions is mitigated by
representatives of those institutions, such as insurance agents, personal invest-
ment counselors, local officials, parish clergymen, or others with whom individu-
als come into direct personal contact. The historian Geoffrey Hosking explains
that we often “mediate” institutional trust with a personal trust relationship, as
with a primary care doctor. But whether or not these institutional representatives
or subordinates are considered trustworthy usually does not alter people’s atti-
tude, positively or negatively, toward the institutions that employs them. As
Hosking explains, we don’t “replace” trust in institutions with trust in persons.⁵⁹
The same is true regarding the trust that might be vested in the titular head of
an institution, such as a prime minister or president. Trust in such men or women,
who are personally unknown to the general public, is based exclusively on their
frequent exposure in the media. The general public may decide whether a politi-
cal leader, or even a prominent CEO, is trustworthy on the basis of interviews,
public statements, or news items, but such “virtual personal trust” cannot be
vested in the countless strangers who staff the large, complex public institutions
they run.⁶⁰ Those institutions remain faceless and impersonal.
Despite these impediments to establishing trust between individuals and large
public institutions, it is possible to achieve that end by using the same criteria for
granting or withholding trust to individuals. In this way it can be determined, at
least in some instances, whether an institution is honest or truthful, which is the
most important characteristic of trustworthiness. Whether the institution is
⁵⁷ New York Times, Oct. 29, 2019. In the wake of the Wells Fargo scandal involving the creation of
two million sham bank accounts, the new CEO, Timothy Sloan, said that “his immediate and highest
priority is to restore trust in Wells Fargo.” DealBook, Dec. 6, 2016.
⁵⁸ One method for regaining such trust has been the resignation of chief operating executives or
presidents. See for example “U.S.O.C., Trying to Rebuild Trust, Picks New Chief,” New York Times,
July 12, 2018.
⁵⁹ Hosking, Trust: A History, pp. 48–9.
⁶⁰ On virtual public trust see Piotr Sztompka, Trust: A Sociological Theory (Cambridge, 2000), p. 45.
       
honest can be determined by fact-checking its public pronouncements, a rational

assessment that does not involve the emotional dimension of determining per-
sonal trustworthiness.⁶¹ A classic example of such institutional fact-checking was
the discovery that American tobacco companies did in fact know that smoking
caused cancer but refused to publish their findings and consistently lied about

their own research. No wonder that tobacco companies have never been able to
regain the trust of the American people, if they ever had it. The same problem
now plagues the e-cigarette industry, which has steadfastly refused to admit the
dangers of vaping.
This application of the idea of trust from the private to the public sphere, from
society to institutions, was evident in the early modern period, when a growing
emphasis on the importance of social or personal trust informed the new dis-
course on trust in institutions.⁶² These references, which the rapidly growing
printing industry made available to a large segment of the literate population,
provided early modern writers with a set of concerns and a vocabulary regarding
trust that they applied to institutions. Much of that discourse, it should be empha-
sized, dealt with the negative dimension of trust: the difficulty maintaining it, the
risks involved in granting it, and its violation or betrayal.⁶³ Raleigh, for example,
cautioned that we should “trust few men and above all keep your follies to your-
self,” while Shakespeare agreed that we should “Love all, trust a few, do wrong to
none.”⁶⁴ In Henry V Shakespeare advised, even more cautiously, “Trust none; for
oaths are straws; men’s faiths are wafer-cakes.”⁶⁵ An English proverb cited fre-
quently in the seventeenth century asserted that “Trust is the mother of deceit,” a
sentiment that Benjamin Franklin endorsed a century later when he declared,
“There is none deceived but he that trusts.”⁶⁶ These cautious if not negative state-
ments regarding personal trust influenced the discourse on institutional trust that
developed in the British Atlantic world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centu-
ries. As might be expected, that discourse contributed to unprecedented distrust
in political, legal, financial, and ecclesiastical institutions.
The pages that follow contain ample examples of the application of the criteria
for granting or withholding trust from individuals to institutions. We see it most
clearly in the extension of the personal distrust of King Charles I to his entire
Privy Council in the 1640s and again in John Locke’s extension of his personal
⁶¹ Hardin, “Trusting Persons, Trusting Institutions,” pp. 185–210; Henry Farrell, “Institutions and
Midlevel Explanations of Trust,” in Whom Can We Trust? How Groups, Networks, and Institutions
Make Trust Possible, edited by Karen S. Cook, Margaret Levi, and Russell Hardin (New York:
2009), p.129.
⁶² Hardin, “Trusting Persons, Trusting Institutions,” p. 199.
⁶³ On the tendency of literature to deal with distrust or the betrayal of trust rather than trust itself,
see Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, p. 28.
⁶⁴ William Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well, 1.1.61–2.
⁶⁵ William Shakespeare, King Henry the Fifth, 2.3.53.
⁶⁶ Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack (1733).
, ,   
distrust of Charles II to that of Parliament in the late 1680s. We see it also in the
claim by the Tory propagandist Abel Boyer in 1710 that public credit no longer
depended on personal trust in the prime minister but on “opinion or confidence”
in a depersonalized government, “founded on its ability, honesty and punctuality.”⁶⁷
And we see it in the extension of the palpable personal distrust of Archbishop

William Laud to the entire clerical establishment in the 1630s and early 1640s.
It is even apparent in the extension of the distrust of Chief Justice George Jeffreys
for violation of the rights of English subjects to the judiciary in the 1680s.
Somewhere in between trusting individuals and trusting institutions are trust
networks—social arrangements comprising people who share similar values and
who therefore are inclined to trust each other. Such networks exist in everyday
life and serve the function of allowing their mutually trusting members to say or
do something that might not have the same positive reception among people out-
side the network. Charles Tilly has written extensively on the role of trust net-
works in the past and how they have related to, and interacted with, systems of
rule.⁶⁸ Those networks, which include Waldensian heretics in the Middle Ages;
parishioners in the village of Morebath during the English Reformation; pirate
crews operating in the Atlantic in the eighteenth century; and local communes in
the United States between 1787 and 1853, have arisen among groups of persons
who have operated independently of larger institutions. Trust networks can exist
both within and outside legitimate institutions; crime syndicates are an example
of the latter.⁶⁹ Trust networks often develop during periods of political instability,
when divisions often occur within ruling elites. The gentry who opposed the
regime of Charles I in the early seventeenth century formed one such network,
and the radical Whigs with whom John Locke associated in the 1670s and early
1680s formed another.⁷⁰
Trust and Distrust in Medieval England
There is no reason to believe that trust was less important in ancient and medie-
val Europe than in the period with which this book is concerned. In a household
economy serving predominantly local markets, such as prevailed in England until
the seventeenth century, trust was essential to lending, borrowing, and realizing
profits. A merchant, tradesman, or producer had to cultivate a reputation for
⁶⁷ Abel Boyer, An Essay towards the History of the Last Ministry and Parliament (London,
1710);Carl Wennerlind, Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620–1720 (Cambridge,
MA, 2011), pp. 179–80.
⁶⁸ Charles Tilly, Trust and Rule (Cambridge, 2005).
⁶⁹ Organizations or groups operating in the interest of society but outside the government, known
collectively as civil society, can also be trust networks.
⁷⁰ Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge,
1986).
       
honesty and reliability in order to secure the trust of his clients or lenders, while the
trustworthiness of neighbors to adhere to the terms of their contracts, which were
mostly verbal, was essential to local economic transactions. Commercial transac-
tions at the local level therefore depended on mutual trust between producers and
consumers and between lenders and borrowers. In this context it is reasonable to

argue that medieval England was a trusting society.⁷¹ Another indication of the
importance of trust in medieval England (and Europe) was the significance
attached to taking oaths. This widespread statement of trust was hardly restricted
to so-called “feudal” relationships between lord and vassal, in which oaths of
fidelity were often formulaic. More important were oaths at law, which were taken
more seriously than in law courts today. A third indication of the importance of
trust was that the bishops of the medieval church relied on “trustworthy men,”
who were mainly peasant elites, in the parishes to provide them with information
for effective ecclesiastical government.⁷² In this respect the medieval church was
based upon trust between bishops and men in the parishes to run their dioceses.
The larger question, however, and the one that directly relates to the main con-
cern of this book, is whether, or to what extent, trust in institutions existed in the
Middle Ages. It is certainly reasonable to argue that since medieval communities
accepted the legitimacy of both local and national governments, they trusted
those institutions or distrusted them when they viewed them as illegitimate. In
that sense there may have been some institutional trust in the late medieval
period. But that trust differed in a number of respects from the institutional trust
that gradually emerged in seventeenth-century England. First, explicit statements
of institutional trust or distrust were rare, if not completely absent, in the literary
texts and the documentary record of medieval England. For this reason Susan
Reynolds can only refer to “apparent” trust or distrust in medieval institutions.⁷³
This was to be expected in a manuscript culture and one marked by a low level of
literacy. By contrast, in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, the
burgeoning printing industry made statements of trust or distrust explicit, and
those statements were conveyed to a much larger and more literate audience.
Second, there was a significant difference in the size of the political nation in the
two periods. In the Middle Ages expressions of trust or distrust emanated mainly
from small aristocratic elites. In one sense these elites were the successors of the
electorate in the city-states of ancient Greece, since the members of the nobility
knew each other personally or by reputation. Only in the seventeenth century
⁷¹ Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, pp. 148–9. On the limits of good reputations and the trust
upon which they were based, see Emily Kadenz, “Pre-Modern Credit Networks and the Limits of
Reputation,” Iowa Law Review, 100 (2015), pp. 2429–55.
⁷² Forrest, Trustworthy Men.
⁷³ Susan Reynolds, “Trust in Medieval Society and Politics,” in Reynolds, The Middle Ages without
Feudalism: Essays in Criticism and Comparison in the Medieval West (Farnham, 2012), ch. 13, p. 4.
Reynolds’s claim that “trust and distrust went far beyond merely local and personal relationships”
requires significant qualification.
, ,   
could one begin to refer to the “public trust,” as John Locke did and as we still do
today. Third, in the Middle Ages most of the political institutions with which the
political nation was familiar were local and did not extend beyond the county.
Moreover, the officials who staffed local and county institutions were personally
known to parish ruling elites. To be sure, local and county officeholders occasion-

ally came into contact with royal or seignorial officials, just as people today come
into contact with representatives of national institutions. Their attitudes toward
those institutional representatives, however, had little bearing on their attitudes
toward the strangers who staffed central political, legal, or ecclesiastical institu-
tions with whom they had no direct contact or knowledge.
There were very few explicit expressions of trust or distrust in central institu-
tions, or even in the individual officials who controlled those institutions, in the
Middle Ages. The barons who forced King John to sign Magna Carta in 1215 had
certainly lost trust in him, but that distrust was not referred to in the sixty-three
articles of Magna Carta. The only recorded reference to the untrustworthiness of
John—and not specifically for his political malfeasance—appears in the words of
the troubadour poet Bertran de Born, who sang, “No man may trust him for his
heart is soft and cowardly.” What is more, despite all the protests against John’s
policies, the barons did not express distrust of the institution of the English
monarchy.
One also looks in vain for references to the distrust of either Edward II, who was
deposed in 1327, or his great-grandson Richard II, who met the same fate in 1399.
The legal charge against each of them was that he was a rex inutilis, that is, a useless
king. This theory of political uselessness, which Pope Boniface VIII had used to
provide a legal validation of the abdication of his predecessor, Pope Clementine V,
in 1294, was derived from canon law. The electors of the Holy Roman Emperor had
also appealed to this legal theory to justify the deposition of Emperor Adolf of
Nassau in 1298.⁷⁴ In contrast to all these medieval depositions, Charles I of England
was tried and executed in 1649 for violating the trust placed in him, not for his
alleged uselessness. An even more striking contrast with these medieval depositions
was that the proceedings against Charles involved institutional as well as personal
political distrust, as his entire administration was dismantled in 1641 and the mon-
archy itself was abolished nine days after he was executed.
There also were very few expressions of distrust in the English Church in the
Middle Ages. The bonds of trust between bishops and “trustworthy” parish elites
were central to the effective administration of the Church, as Ian Forrest has
shown, and for the most part the laity trusted the parish clergy, who played a
central role in the religious and life of the parishes. There were of course occa-
sional expressions of anticlericalism, but these were not usually directed at the
⁷⁴ Edward Peters, The Shadow King: Rex Inutilis in Medieval Law and Literature (New Haven, 1970).
       
clergy as a whole. Even the late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century heresy of Lollardy,
which called for a variety of doctrinal and liturgical reforms, did not foster wide-
spread distrust of the clergy. Lollards objected to clerical celibacy, confession to a
priest, and the ordination of priests in ceremonies that lacked scriptural authority,
but the only proposal in their Twelve Conclusions of 1395 that reflected distrust

of the Church as an institution was the denial of the clergy’s exercise of secular
political power.
There is also hardly any evidence that English law courts incurred sustained
distrust during the Middle Ages. The main reason for this was that ever since the
development of the common law in the late twelfth century, civil and criminal
lawsuits were determined by juries composed of lay judges, that is, men not
trained in the law, and those jurors came from county communities. Because
jurors were not officers of the court, they were generally trusted to approve or
reject indictments in grand juries and deliver verdicts as members of petty juries
in criminal trials. This system of justice differed from that which developed about
the same time on the Continent, especially in parts of France, Italy, Germany,
Switzerland, and Spain. In those states or regimes the settlement of legal disputes
and the prosecution of criminals was conducted by professionally trained judges.
Of course individual lawsuits almost always reflected personal distrust of one
party or the other, as they still do today. But until the late fifteenth century, there
is little evidence of distrust in the law courts themselves, much less the legal sys-
tem, which remained a source of pride, at least within the English political nation.
This pride in the English legal system, and the corresponding disparagement of
the system that was in operation in France, was eloquently (and in some respects
misleadingly) conveyed in the treatise by Sir John Fortescue, In Praise of the Laws
of England, which he wrote in the 1470s during the reign of Edward IV.⁷⁵
It would be pointless to discuss trust or distrust in English financial institu-
tions in the Middle Ages, as there were no English banks until the middle of the
seventeenth century, and a national bank was not established until 1694. Most
borrowing and lending in the medieval period took place on a personal level
between merchants and tradesmen in local communities, while wealthy merchants
and especially the Crown could negotiate loans with wealthy families in Florence,
which had become the banking center of Europe by the end of the thirteenth cen-
tury. During the Hundred Years’ War with France (1337–1453) the English gov-
ernment borrowed large sums of money from the Bari and Peruzzi families,
which had established branches of their banks in England. When Edward III
defaulted on those loans in 1347, both banks failed. The default obviously
destroyed any trust that may have existed between the banks and the Crown, but
no English financial institutions had been involved in the transactions.
⁷⁵ Sir John Fortescue, De laudibus legum Angliae (London, 1543). Fortescue was the former chief
justice of the Court of King’s Bench and chancellor during the reign of Edward IV and had spent time
as a diplomat in France.
, ,   
There also were very few commercial institutions in medieval England. Guilds,
which were associations of merchants and artisans that regulated economic pro-
duction and trade in cities and towns, cannot be considered national or central
institutions. The only such association that acquired national institutional status
was the Company of Merchant Adventurers of London, which received a charter

from Henry 1V in 1407. The Adventurers enjoyed a monopoly of the export of
unfinished cloth to various markets on the Continent in exchange for the right to
import a broad range of foreign goods. Other London merchants may have been
jealous of the Company’s privileges, but there is no evidence that their jealousy
amounted to distrust.
The Growth of Institutional Distrust in England, 1500–1660
Distrust in institutions, which was either non-existent or in short supply during

the Middle Ages, found more frequent expression between 1550 and 1660, as lit-
erary references to trust became more common, literacy expanded, and national
institutions grew in size and scope. There were occasional manifestations of
institutional distrust in the sixteenth century, but only in the first half of the
seventeenth century, and especially during the 1630s and 1640s, did it become
widespread. Distrust was most vocal and explicit in the arena of national politics;
distrust of legal, ecclesiastical, and commercial institutions was in many ways
subordinate or closely related to distrust of Westminster. When distrust in public
institutions recurred in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, dis-
trust of government once again was its main source.
Politics
There were occasional manifestations of distrust in the English government

during the rebellions that took place in the sixteenth century, most notably
the Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536–7 and the uprisings led by Thomas Wyatt against
the proposed marriage of Mary I to Prince Philip of Spain in 1554. But only in the
early seventeenth century did distrust in English political institutions become
explicit and have a transformative effect, leading eventually to the abolition of the
monarchy and the House of Lords in 1649.
As in so many other instances, distrust of the government in the early Stuart
period originated in distrust of individual politicians. The first clear statement
of that sentiment was the impeachment of George Villiers, the first duke of
Buckingham in 1626. Buckingham had been the king’s main adviser during the
second half of the reign of James I and continued in that capacity during the first
three years of Charles I’s reign. His rapid ascent to power, his sale of peerages
       
(which resulted in their loss of prestige and pitted old noblemen against those
more recently elevated), and the destruction of his political rivals made him
increasingly vulnerable to political attacks, which intensified after the accession
of Charles. Central to that loss of trust was Buckingham’s role in the war against
Spain, which began in 1625. Buckingham had been the main architect of that war,

and as Lord Admiral he had led an expedition against the Spanish port of Cádiz,
which had resulted in significant English losses. In a speech on the floor of the
House of Commons, Sir John Eliot, who had until recently been a friend of
Buckingham but had grown to dislike him, blamed him for this disaster: “Our
honor is ruined, our ships are sunk, our men perished, not by the sword, not by
an enemy, not by chance, but . . . by those we trust.”⁷⁶
Buckingham’s failure at Cádiz was not the only reason the Commons lost trust
in him. The articles of impeachment accused him, among other things, of monop-
olizing offices traditionally given to persons of “wisdom, trust and ability,” result-
ing in danger to the state; violating the “faith and trust” placed in him to maintain
the naval strength of the kingdom; buying and selling “places and offices of trust”;
extorting money from the East India Company; and misspending public money
that was entrusted to him.⁷⁷ All this amounted to an “abuse of power and trust,” a
charge that was made against many ministers of the Crown in subsequent
impeachment trials.
Not long after the impeachment of Buckingham, which Charles derailed by
dissolving Parliament, many MPs and other members of the political nation
began to distrust the king himself.⁷⁸ Untrustworthiness was a fundamental flaw
in Charles’s character. Unlike his father, who was usually open and honest,
Charles was rigid and aloof, and he reportedly had difficulty looking at people
directly. He also found it difficult to trust other people, although he did develop
trusting relationships with a few close advisers, including Buckingham.⁷⁹ But on
many occasions during his reign Charles showed that he could not be trusted.⁸⁰
It is unlikely that many MPs in the early years of Charles’s reign were aware of
Charles’s personal untrustworthiness, but their opposition to his policies during
these years began to erode political trust in him. They were of course reluctant to
acknowledge that lack of trust explicitly, as they did when they lashed out at
Buckingham during his impeachment; those statements of distrust would not
come until later in his reign. But distrust of Charles as a ruler became increasingly
evident in their conflicts with him in the parliaments of the late 1620s, and it
⁷⁶ Roger Lockyer, Buckingham: The Life and Political Career of George Villiers, First Duke of
Buckingham, 1592–1628 (London, 1981), p. 309.
⁷⁷ John Rushworth, Historical Collections of Private Passages of State (London, 1721), vol. 1,
pp. 302–58.
⁷⁸ Michael B. Young, “Charles I and the Erosion of Trust, 1625–1628,” Albion, 22 (1990), pp. 217–35.
⁷⁹ Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, 1992), p. 192.
⁸⁰ On Charles’s difficulty being trusted, see J.P. Kenyon, The Stuarts: A Study in English Kingship
(London, 1966), p. 83.
, ,   
crystalized which Charles dismissed the fateful parliament of 1628–9, giving no

indication that he intended to call another, at least not in the foreseeable future.
This indefinite postponement of a new parliament appeared to violate what MPS
referred to as the “ancient constitution,” the theory of mixed monarchy embodied
in the political writing of Sir John Fortescue in the late fifteenth century. Distrust

of Charles’s designs to introduce a form of royal absolutism were reinforced by
the king’s frequent violations of the Petition of Right, to which he had given his
consent in 1628. In that document he had agreed to adhere to a number of poli-
cies, the most consequential being a pledge not to tax his subjects without the
consent of Parliament. Charles repeatedly violated the terms of the Petition, espe-
cially by collecting money, in lieu of providing the Crown with actual ships,
allegedly to defend against attacks by French pirates in the Channel. The judges of
the central courts at Westminster ultimately upheld the king’s right to collect ship
money by a narrow margin of 7 to 5, but that decision did little to counteract the
corrosive distrust of the king’s absolutist program. As the lawyers in the Inns of
Court mused after the decision, in which Sir George Croke voted with the
minority, “The king had ship money by hook, but not by Croke.”
Distrust of Charles intensified during the two-year period before the outbreak
of the Civil War. In April 1641 the king went back on his word by allowing the
earl of Strafford to be impeached and executed for treason after promising to pro-
tect him from that fate. In the eyes of even the king’s supporters this betrayal
revealed that Charles could not be trusted to keep his promises. A demonstration
of more widespread distrust of the king occurred in November of that year over
the raising of an army to suppress a Catholic uprising in Ireland. A fear arose that
Charles would turn this army, once mobilized, against his own people as it crossed
southern England on its way to Ireland. To prevent this from happening, John
Pym proposed, as part of the bill for sending English troops to Ireland, that the
king employ only those officers approved by Parliament. The next month, after
the elections to the Common Council of London returned a majority of oppo-
nents of the Crown, Charles took the step of replacing the Lieutenant of the
Tower, Sir William Balfour, with the committed Royalist Sir Thomas Lunsford.
This decision, which was in effect a declaration of war, elicited the statement from
the petitioners that Balfour, unlike Lunsford, was “a person of trust.”⁸¹
A more flagrant violation of trust by Charles occurred in January 1642, when
the king forced his way into the House of Commons to arrest five MPs for trea-
son, thereby violating the longstanding custom that the king should never enter
the lower house. This incident actually reflected mutual distrust between king
and Parliament, since Charles did not trust the Five Members, who had been cor-
responding with the Scots during the Bishops’ Wars. In June Parliament gave
⁸¹ Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolutionaries: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and
London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton, 1993), p. 363.
       
further expression of its distrust of Charles by demanding, in the Nineteen

Propositions, that Parliament approve all appointments by the king. That demand
for prior review of all the king’s appointments—not just his military officers—
showed that the parliamentary opponents distrusted not only Charles but also his
councilors. This distrust of Charles’s entire government had been also implicit in

the impeachment of the king’s privy councilors and his bishops—in effect the entire
Caroline regime—in 1641.⁸² This institutional distrust became even more intense
after the war began, as the opposing sides—Royalists and Parliamentarians—
became enveloped in a sea of distrust, which found expression in the pamphlet
literature of the 1640s. Distrust even developed within Parliamentarian and
Royalist circles, especially among the different parties in the House of Commons
after Royalist MPs left London and Westminster at the beginning of the war.
These parties, known as the Peace Party, the War Party, and the Middle Group,
gradually morphed into the Presbyterian and Independent parties, the former
based on the Peace Party of 1643. As Timothy Hackett has argued in writing
about the French Revolution, trust is one of the casualties of revolution, as former
allies become new antagonists and men abandon their political principles in
order to survive. In this way, distrust works against political consensus and can
even corrupt the political process itself.⁸³
Although distrust of Charles now encompassed his entire administration, it
also continued to focus on Charles himself during the war. The specific claim that
Charles could not be trusted arose when the king, having lost the Civil War in
1646, opened negotiations with his former adversaries, the Scots and the
Presbyterians, in December 1647. At the time, Oliver Cromwell, a major-general
in the New Model Army and also a Member of Parliament, denounced the king as
“so great a dissembler and so false a man that he could not be trusted.” After a
brief second civil war, in which the army defeated the Scots and Presbyterians,
Charles was tried for treason in a special court of judicature set up by the
Independents in Parliament after the army had purged that assembly of all
Presbyterians. The charge against the king at his trial was that by waging war
against his own people, he had violated the trust placed in him. The formal charge
read: “Charles Stuart, being admitted king of England, and thereby trusted with a
limited power to govern by and according to the laws of the land, has wickedly
designed to erect an unlimited and tyrannical power.” In this way the court gave
formal expression to the political principle that a ruler could be removed from
office for violating the trust placed in him, a claim that later became a central ele-
ment of John Locke’s political philosophy. The idea of political office (as distinct
from feudal lordship) as a public trust, a mainstay of liberal democratic thought
until the present day, found one of its earliest and most forceful expressions in
⁸² One quarter of all impeachments in English history occurred in 1641–2.

⁸³ Timothy Hackett, The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution (Cambridge, 2015).
, ,   
this charge against King Charles. It also found expression in the demands of the
radicals in the City of London who came to power in 1649 that places of “public
trust,” especially in the militia and navy, be purged of “unreliable” elements and
replaced with trustworthy men like themselves.⁸⁴
The conviction and execution of Charles led shortly to the destruction of the

monarchy itself and the establishment of a republic, which lasted until 1660. This
radical change in the system of government, as opposed to its personnel, also
reflected personal distrust, since the impossibility of trusting the king to reach a
negotiated settlement made the continuation of the monarchy too great a risk to
contemplate, and the king’s survival or even his replacement by one of his sons,
would continue to be an inspiration to royalist Presbyterian resistance. The
republic established in 1649 was soon bedeviled by its own issues of trust, most
notably when John Lilburne, writing from prison in 1649, declared that the exec-
utive power of the new republic, the Council of State, which, like Charles’s Privy
Council, was an institution, could not be trusted.⁸⁵ Cromwell, the dominant figure
in the Council of State, incurred even greater distrust when he became Lord
Protector in 1653. It is significant that the personal distrust of Charles, which
developed into a broader distrust of his entire regime and led ultimately to a
change in the system of government itself, provided a theoretical and historical
source for the claim by Locke that all government should be based on trust and
that when the people decide to replace a government that violated that trust, they
could even change the system of government itself.
Religion
Distrust in the English Church cannot be separated from distrust in government,

both because the established Church was controlled by the state ever since the
Henrician Reformation of the 1530s and because the Church cooperated with the
state in the maintenance of public order. Bishops, moreover, sat in the House of
Lords and some of them served on the Privy Council. It is hardly surprising
therefore that the most intense period of distrust in the English Church before
1660 coincided with that of the government in the middle of the seventeenth
century and that both episcopacy and the monarchy were abolished within three
years of each other.
Distrust of the English Church in the early seventeenth century began as per-
sonal distrust of William Laud, the archbishop of Canterbury, but soon it was
extended to the entire episcopate for implementing his agenda, including his
efforts to increase the wealth and social status of the clergy, his emphasis on the
⁸⁴ Brenner, Merchants and Revolutionaries, pp. 452, 550–1.

⁸⁵ Lilburne, England’s New Chains Discovered (London, 1649).
       
importance of the sacraments in religious practice, and his modification of the

Calvinist doctrine of predestination. During Laud’s archiepiscopate, therefore,
personal distrust of the archbishop became almost indistinguishable from dis-
trust of the English Church. Distrust of Laud for both his religious and his politi-
cal policies resulted in his impeachment in 1641 and his execution in 1645, while

distrust of the Church under his leadership led to the abolition of ecclesiastical
criminal jurisdiction in 1641, the exclusion of the bishops from the House of
Lords in 1642, and the destruction of episcopacy in 1646.
Law
Distrust in legal institutions had never been as strong as distrust of political or

ecclesiastical institutions, perhaps because of the reliance of people from the
upper and middle levels of society on the courts to resolve civil suits. It is true that
the courts of common law suffered a significant loss of trust in the late fifteenth
and early sixteenth centuries, when they were subject to corruption at the hands
of aristocratic families who gained control of the machinery of justice in outlying
regions of the country. That distrust was remedied by the creation of the preroga-
tive courts that used more flexible procedures than the common law courts. The
most important of these courts was the Court of Star Chamber, which was estab-
lished during the reign of Henry VIII.
The prerogative courts helped to restore a measure of confidence in royal jus-
tice, but Charles I’s use of Star Chamber and the Court of High Commission to
support the unpopular secular and religious policies of his government during
the personal rule triggered a deeper loss of trust in the legal system in the 1630s,
resulting, among other things, in the abolition of both courts in 1641.
Another wave of distrust of legal institutions, this time in the common law courts
and the Court of Chancery, occurred during the civil wars and the period of repub-
lican rule that followed the abolition of the monarchy in 1649. In those years pam-
phleteers and legal writers of various political persuasions called for the reform not
only of legal procedures but also of the law itself. As with political institutions, with
which the courts were closely related because they were part of the machinery of
government, the most serious loss of trust in legal institutions in the years between
1500 and 1660 arose during the middle decades of the seventeenth century.
Finance and Commerce
It is more problematic to discuss the growth of distrust in financial institutions

during the period from 1500 to 1660, as there were no banks in England until
1650, when a cloth merchant named Thomas Smith opened a provincial bank in
, ,   
Nottingham, and no national bank until the establishment of the Bank of England
in 1694. Without the option of borrowing from foreign sources, as Edward III
had done in the fourteenth century, English monarchs had to pressure their own
subjects to lend the Crown money when the government had exhausted its
income from other sources. The problem with this strategy was that such loans

were taxes in all but name, and taxes could only be levied by Parliament. The
solution to this dilemma was to label the loans as benevolences or gifts, given to
the Crown by “grateful” subjects who would have no claim to reimbursement.
The first such benevolence was collected by Edward IV in 1473, and Henry VII
managed to secure £48,000 by means of a benevolence during his brief conflict
with France in 1491. Henry VIII had mixed success with his benevolences. The
first, known as the Amicable Grant of 1525, which the king earmarked for a
planned invasion of France, had to be canceled, together with plans for the inva-
sion, when his subjects came close to rebellion over the measure. The situation
was so precarious at Lavenham, Suffolk, where some 4,000 protesters had gath-
ered, that the king had to send troops to disburse the angry subjects. Henry’s
second benevolence, which helped to fund his war with France in 1545, yielded
£120,000. Elizabeth I raised modest sums of money by benevolences that
extracted contributions from small groups of wealthy subjects during the war
with Spain, and James I used similar grants to bolster royal revenue after the fail-
ure of the Addled Parliament of 1614.
Benevolences were potential sources of distrust in the monarch or the govern-
ment, and in order to distract it from himself, Henry VIII claimed he had no
knowledge of the Amicable Grant and blamed it entirely on Cardinal Wolsey.
Charles I, however, could not prevent distrust from arising in reaction to the
forced loan of 1626, which he needed to help fund the wars with Spain and
France. The reason for his failure is that the forced loan, which was always viewed
as a tax, was levied at a time when both Buckingham, who was the architect of the
loan, and Charles had proven themselves personally untrustworthy, while distrust
of the entire royal government had already begun to materialize.
Distrust of commercial institutions became closely associated with distrust of
government in the years before the revolution. The main critics of the chartered
companies were the independent merchants of London who wanted a share in
the overseas trade and often became interlopers. The companies had monopolies
of the trade with various parts of Europe, America, and Asia. As competition for
overseas markets increased, distrust arose between the two groups of merchants,
and these hostilities contributed to the main political divisions of the 1640s. The
chartered companies tended to ally themselves with the Crown, with which they
had a mutually advantageous relationship, whereas the independent merchants
became increasingly critical of the government. One indication of this division
among the London merchants is that not one of the eighty-three signatories of the
petition against the appointment of Sir Thomas Lunsford was a member of a
       
chartered trading company, while all the London merchants who signed it were
interlopers in the colonial or European trade.⁸⁶ Just as with the growing distrust
of the English Church and the legal system, distrust of chartered companies
engaged in foreign trade translated into distrust of the of government in the revo-
lutionary decades of the early seventeenth century.

Conclusion
In 1660 England’s central political and ecclesiastical institutions recovered from

the crisis of distrust they had endured during the revolution. The monarchy, the
House of Lords, and the English Church were all restored, while the common law
courts, no longer rivaled by the prerogative and church courts, emerged relatively
unscathed by the movement for law reform during the previous two decades. The
system of royal finance, which had long been a source of political opposition in
the first half of the century, continued to function as it had before the revolution.
The Crown resumed the practice of granting new charters to companies engaged
in foreign trade. And by not repealing the legislation of 1641, which had spelled
the end of the personal rule, it appeared that trust of public institutions had also
returned, marking the beginning of a new period of political stability.
Those appearances proved to be deceptive. Not only did distrust of those
institutions return, but it became deeper and more widespread than in the revolu-
tionary period. As the next chapter shows, the renewed manifestations of political
distrust of the administrations of Charles II and James II played a major role in
causing the Glorious Revolution, and for thirty years thereafter it bedeviled both
Whig and Tory governments in the so-called “rage of party.”
The Church of England never fully recovered from the profound loss of trust it
suffered during the revolution. Distrust in that institution during the Restoration
period emanated mainly from nonconformist or dissenting congregations, who
were subjected to a more severe persecution than Puritans had been during the
Laudian period, a persecution in which Parliament and the secular courts were
complicit. Although Parliament replaced this policy of persecution with one of
toleration in 1689, distrust of the established Church by dissenters and their Whig
supporters continued into the early nineteenth century.
Although the common law courts appeared to have triumphed over the pre-
rogative and church courts in 1660, they incurred newfound distrust in the fol-
lowing years for their prosecution of dissenters and Whigs and for undermining
the independence of juries, the repository of widespread institutional trust. The
period after 1660 also witnessed new manifestations of distrust in the system of
⁸⁶ Brenner, Merchants and Revolutionaries, p. 364.

, ,   
royal finance, by which the Crown borrowed money and granted charters to trading
companies in exchange for financial support. In the aftermath of the Glorious
Revolution, Parliament created new financial institutions, most notably the Bank
of England, and experimented with new schemes to reduce the national debt.
These new institutions and debt reduction schemes, coupled with the corrupt

practices of the major trading companies, which included the manipulation of
stock prices, created even deeper distrust of commercial institutions and the
financial system than had prevailed in the first half of the century. All this public
distrust came to a head in the South Sea Bubble, the greatest financial scandal in
British history and one in which the government was complicit.
As distrust in the absolutist regime of Charles II deepened during the
Restoration period, John Locke, a dissenter who had developed connections with
a group of radical Whigs, wrote Two Treatises of Government, which was pub-
lished anonymously shortly after the Glorious Revolution. One of Locke’s main
arguments was that all government was based on trust, and that if a prince or
legislature violated that trust, the people, in whom sovereignty resided, had a
right to overthrow the government and put another in its place. Locke was not the
only Whig to write with conviction against the policies of the late Stuart monar-
chy; Algernon Sidney apparently had greater influence in the period after the
Glorious Revolution. But no early modern philosopher or political theorist wrote
so persuasively on the importance of public trust in political authorities and insti-
tutions. For that reason Locke is the main subject of the following chapter on
trust in political institutions in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
2
John Locke and Trust in Government

The clearest statement regarding the importance of trust in government appeared
in John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, which he wrote in the early 1680s
and published anonymously in 1689, shortly after the Glorious Revolution.
Locke’s famous statement that all government is fiduciary, that is, based on trust,
arose in response to a gradual loss of trust in English monarchs and their minis-
ters that had begun in the early seventeenth century. As we have seen, that loss of
institutional trust began as a loss of personal trust MPs had in the councilors of
Charles I, especially the duke of Buckingham, and Charles himself. By the 1630s
they had lost trust in the entire Stuart regime, which collapsed in 1641 and was
replaced by a republic in 1649. After the Restoration, the issue of trust arose once
again during the reign of Charles II (1660–85) and the brief reign of his brother,
James II (1685–8). It was the loss of trust in the governments of those two late
Stuart kings, especially that of Charles II, that led Locke to give a theoretical foun-
dation to the principle that government is, or should be, based on trust. In this
way Locke charted the transition from personal to institutional distrust, arguing
that the people could overthrow and replace a government that had betrayed the
trust placed in it. He also claimed that in setting up a new government the people
could, if deemed necessary, change not only the personnel but also the system of
government.
Charles II did not appear to be as personally untrustworthy as his father, but
his absolutist political program inspired equal or even greater institutional dis-
trust. It has often been said that the Restoration did not resolve any of the prob-
lems that led to the revolution of mid-century; it simply restated them under new
and different circumstances. The source of this recurring political problem was
that Charles II had been restored without conditions, and although the legislation
of 1641 had dismantled the system of government that had existed in the 1630s
(indefinite rule without Parliament, taxation without the consent of Parliament,
and conciliar justice), the extent of the royal prerogative—which was the main
constitutional issue throughout the first half of the seventeenth century—had
never been addressed. The undefined royal prerogative was in effect a large loop-
hole in the Restoration settlement, and Charles exploited it in the 1670s and 1680s.
      
Absolutism in the Reign of Charles II
There were four major elements of Charles II’s absolutism. The first was the king’s
exercise of the so-called suspending power, by which he refused to enforce parlia-
mentary statutes by virtue of his prerogative. Charles invoked this power in the

Declaration of Indulgence of 1672, in which he suspended the penal laws against
Roman Catholics in accordance with the secret clauses of the Treaty of Dover
(1670) that he had negotiated with Louis XIV of France in exchange for a French
subsidy of £170,000. The unprecedented exercise of this power by Charles in
1672, as part of the English alliance with France against the Dutch in the Third
Anglo-Dutch War, raised fears that Charles intended to establish a French-style
royal absolutism and tolerate Roman Catholics. These fears laid the foundation
for the distrust of Charles and his government that grew only more intense in the
1680s. When James II, a Roman Catholic convert, invoked the same suspending
power in his two Declarations of Indulgence (1687 and 1688) to give freedom of
worship to Catholics as well as Protestant dissenters, the declaration that such
power was illegal became the first provision in the Bill of Rights. Locke also had
James in mind when he published Two Treatises of Government, but when he
wrote the treatises in the early 1680s, the Declaration of Indulgence in 1672 had
already become one of the main sources of his hatred of royal absolutism and its
association with Roman Catholicism.
The secret clauses of the Treaty of Dover and Charles’s alliance with France
provided an even more profound source of distrust in Charles than his use of the
suspending power, for it revealed that he had secretly aligned himself with a for-
eign power that the Protestant nation considered to be its adversary. (England at
the time was formally allied with the Dutch Republic and Sweden in the Triple
Alliance of 1668.) In the Second Treatise of Government Locke claimed that “deliv-
ering the people into the subjection of a foreign power” was one of the justifica-
tions for dissolving the government and replacing it with another.¹ Locke almost
certainly had the Treaty of Dover in mind when he wrote this justification for
dissolving the government. Much fresher in his mind were Charles’s further
negotiations with France in 1681, when the king received yet another French sub-
sidy that enabled him to rule without Parliament for the last four years of his
reign. The use of the suspending power, coupled with the French subsidy, was
therefore central to the claim by Locke that the king was setting up arbitrary rule
in place of legislation.
The second element of Charles II’s absolutism became evident during the
Exclusion Crisis of 1678–81, in which the Whig party, under the direction of its
founder, Anthony Ashley Cooper, the earl of Shaftesbury, tried unsuccessfully to
¹ John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, in John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter
Laslett, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1967), para. 217.
       
exclude James, the duke of York, Charles’s younger brother, from the succession to
the throne on the grounds that he was a Catholic. In order to prevent the Whigs
from passing an exclusion bill, Charles prorogued (i.e., suspended) the Second
Exclusion Parliament, which had returned a majority of Whigs. The prorogation
lasted almost a year, during which time Whigs (who acquired their name during

this crisis) engaged in petitioning campaigns and public demonstrations to promote
Parliament’s reassembly. Charles’s prorogation only deepened Whig distrust and
provided Locke with another condition by which the government could be dissolved.
A third element of Charles’s absolutism involved his deliberate attempt to
destroy the Whig party after the dissolution of the brief Oxford Parliament, which
was also known as the Third Exclusion Parliament, in March 1681. During the
next three years Charles and the Tory members of his government conducted a
systematic campaign to prevent the Whigs from gaining a majority in the next
Parliament. This enterprise involved a tactic known as quo warranto, a royal writ
by which parliamentary boroughs were forced to surrender their charters, which
the government would not return until they purged Whigs from the governing
bodies of the corporations. This procedure, which suggests parallels to efforts by
Republicans in the United States to purge the voting rolls in the twenty-first cen-
tury, became yet another development which in Locke’s view justified revolution.
The use of quo warranto also deepened distrust of Charles’s government.
The fourth element of Locke’s attack on the absolutism of Charles II was the
deliverance of the country to a foreign power, namely France. Such deliverance
was closely related to the use of the suspending power in 1672, but it was far more
serious. Unlike the other three elements of royal absolutism, deliverance of the
country to a foreign power was later considered to be treason.
Locke’s Theory of Fiduciary Government
The essence of Locke’s theory of fiduciary government is that if either the execu-
tive or the legislature betrayed the trust that the people had placed in them when
they established the government, the people could resist the regime and set up a
new government. Although Charles II was the person who had most clearly vio-
lated the trust placed in him, Locke also identified the legislature as a potential
source of distrust. Thus, from the very outset, Locke bridged the gap between
personal and institutional distrust. Toward the end of the Second Treatise, he also
raised the possibility that the people could even change the system of government
(possibly to a republic, although Locke never specified that) if they felt it was nec-
essary. In this way Locke articulated a theory of institutional and even systemic as
well as personal political distrust.
Locke’s theory of political trust is the most comprehensive treatment of the
subject in modern political philosophy. His articulation of it comes fairly late in
      
the Second Treatise, after his discussion of the state of nature and the state of war,
the formation of civil society, and his theory of property. Only in the final chapter,
in which he discusses the dissolution of the government, does he establish the
centrality of trust to his entire argument. He does anticipate that argument in
discussing the subordination of powers, but those earlier brief references to trust

do not stand alone as comprehensive statements of his thesis. Only in chapter 19
did Locke provide a comprehensive, theoretical justification of revolution on the
basis of a breach of trust.
Locke begins that chapter by enumerating the circumstances in which a gov-
ernment could be dissolved and the people could establish a new government in
its place. These conditions obtain if the legislature is altered by the executive’s
setting up arbitrary rule, preventing the legislature from assembling, changing the
method of electing legislators, or delivering the country to a foreign power. These
conditions, though stated in general terms that could be applied to other govern-
ments (as in fact they have been), referred to the policies of Charles II in the
1670s and early 1680s. After enumerating these conditions, Locke placed the
responsibility for dissolution squarely on the king rather than the Lords and
Commons, since as supreme magistrate (who in England was a part of Parliament)
he alone could make these changes “under pretence of lawful authority and has it
in his hands to terrify or suppress opposers as factious, seditious, and enemies to
the government.” The other parts of the legislature, the Lords and Commons, did
not escape blame for these changes, because they did not hinder such designs,
and were therefore guilty of compliance in this dissolution of government, “which
is certainly the greatest crime men can be guilty of one towards another.”² It is
difficult to have read these words in 2019 or 2020 and not think of the parallels
between the policies of Charles II and those of President Donald Trump and his
supporters and enablers in Congress.
In identifying the conditions that justified rebellion, Locke was making the
case to fellow Whigs that Charles needed to be removed from office before his
style of government became too repressive. In the most eloquent and arguably the
most radical paragraph in the Two Treatises, Locke wrote that “men can never be
secure from tyranny if there be no means to escape it till they are perfectly under
it. And therefore it is that they not only have a right to get out of it but to prevent
it.”³ A Whig rebellion in the early 1680s did not materialize, although the possibil-
ity arose in 1681 at the Oxford Parliament. The case for rebellion became much
stronger when Charles’s successor, James II, decided to flee the country in
December 1688. James’s absolutist policies and his blanket toleration of Catholics
and Protestant dissenters in his two Declarations of Indulgence (1687 and 1688)
alienated Tories, Whigs, and the Church of England, leading representatives of all
² Locke, Second Treatise, para. 218. ³ Locke, Second Treatise, para. 220.
       
three groups to invite William of Orange, the military leader of the Dutch
Republic and James’s nephew and son-in-law, to bring a large military force to
England to defend the country’s traditional form of government and its Protestant
religion. The banner on his flagship bore the slogan “For the restoration of the
constitution and the true religion in England, Scotland, and Ireland.”Faced with

this military force and the defection of his own troops, James fled the country,
symbolically throwing the Great Seal into the Thames.
In preparing Two Treatises for publication in the summer of 1689, Locke added
a second set of circumstances in which the government could be dissolved from
within to reflect James’s flight and justify the revolution that had taken place just
months before. Those circumstances occurred “when he who has the supreme
executive power neglects and abandons that charge so that the laws already made
can no longer be enforced.” This, Locke explains, “is demonstratively to reduce all
to anarchy . . .Where the laws cannot be executed, it is all one as if there were no
laws, and a government without laws is, I suppose, a mystery in politics, uncon-
ceivable to human capacity, and inconsistent with human society.”⁴ Once again,
the parallels between 1688 and the present day, especially the government’s threat
to the rule of law, are striking.
After establishing this additional set of circumstances in which the government
could be dissolved, Locke confusingly adds yet a third circumstance, which he
identifies as the second: “There is therefore, secondly, another way whereby gov-
ernments are dissolved, and that is when the legislative or the prince, either of
them act contrary to their trust.”⁵ The confusing enumeration of this statement as
the second, after already introducing the second argument about the prince aban-
doning his charge, suggests that this “other way” was originally intended as the
second, before he inserted the argument regarding James II’s abandoning his
charge. Locke had apparently written this statement about the breach of trust
during the first draft of the Two Treatises in the early 1680s. In any case, this state-
ment is significant for two reasons. First, in it Locke gives parity to the prince and
the legislature for violating the public trust; the king no long bears the primary
responsibility, as he had argued in paragraph 218. Second, and more important,
the statement prefaces Locke’s full discussion of his thesis regarding the breach of
trust as a justification of revolution.
The fullest expression of Locke’s theory of trust, and the crux of the entire
argument of the Second Treatise, appears in paragraph 222. He begins by discuss-
ing the violation of trust by the legislature rather than the supreme executor, that
is, the sovereign or prince. After reviewing what he had said earlier in the treatise
that men had entered into society to protect property and to that end had author-
ized the legislature to write laws that limited the power and dominion that men
⁴ Locke, Second Treatise, para. 219. ⁵ Locke, Second Treatise, para. 221.
      
had in the state of nature, he used this theory to justify rebellion: “Whenever the
legislators endeavour to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to
reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of
war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any farther obedience,
and are left to the common refuge, which God hath provided for all men against

force and violence.” He then relates such a rebellion to his theory of trust by argu-
ing that whenever a legislature endeavored to seize such absolute power for them-
selves or another, they violated the trust placed in its members. “By this breach of
trust they forfeit the power that the people had put into their hands for quite
contrary ends, and it devolves to the people, who have right to resume their orig-
inal liberty and by the establishment of a new legislative (such as they shall think
fit) provide for their own safety and security.”
Locke then claimed that what he had written about the legislature held true for
the supreme executor, who had “a double trust” placed in him because he was
both a part of the legislature and the chief executive. The prince violates both
aspects of trust when he sets up his own arbitrary will as the law. With Charles II’s
program to control Parliament clearly in mind, Locke stated that the supreme
executor also acts contrary to his trust when he tries to corrupt the representa-
tives to support his policies, or openly pre-engages voters to elect those who have
promised beforehand what legislation they will support. By referring to Charles’s
efforts to control Parliament in these ways, Locke showed how one could not sep-
arate personal distrust of the king and the institutional distrust of his government.
Locke’s Concept of Trust
Because the issue of trust is central to Locke’s political philosophy, the question
arises what he meant by the term. In particular, it is worth asking whether there
was an emotional dimension to Locke’s understanding of trust. As a philosopher
in the natural law tradition who emphasized the ability of men to understand the
law of nature through reason, there is no denying his view that reason informs
one’s decision to trust. The establishment of a political society, which involves
granting trust to a legislature and an executive, is clearly based on a rational con-
sideration of how best to protect property and guarantee security. The central
burden of Locke’s philosophical thinking was directed toward “an understanding
of the rationality and moral propriety of human trust.”⁶ In one sense, trust in
Locke is based on a rational consideration of expectations. But he also recognizes
that once government has been established, men instinctively feel trust for a good
⁶ John Dunn, “The Concept of ‘Trust’ in the Politics of John Locke,” in Philosophy in History, edited
by Richard Rorty, J.B. Schneerwind, and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 280–1.
       
ruler, much in the same way that children instinctively trust their father to protect
them. This trust of the ruler is based on the feeling that he will preserve peace.⁷
The second issue is whether Locke considered trust a moral virtue. There is
widespread agreement that Locke’s political philosophy was theocentric and had
a moral foundation. His philosophy, especially his political philosophy, empha-

sized moral obligations and the morality of trust. For Locke, the most important
moral duty of an individual was to act toward others in a way that deserves their
trust. Most of all, he was expected to be honest and truthful and keep his prom-
ises. Thus it was trustworthiness, which he defined as “the capacity to fulfill the
legitimate expectations of others,” that gave the act of trust its moral dimension.
Hence trustworthiness, especially the moral obligation to keep promises, was for
Locke the “constitutive virtue of, and the key causal precondition for the existence
of, any society.”⁸
The third issue is what Locke means when he wrote that government itself was
a trust, that is, a corporate entity in which people placed their trust.⁹ When Locke
used the word “trust” in this sense, he may have been thinking of the financial
instruments property owners used to protect the integrity of their assets. Locke
was familiar with such trusts when he served as secretary in the Court of
Chancery, where issues regarding legal trusts were litigated. In medieval private
law, moreover, trusts were identified as corporations.¹⁰ But it is unlikely that
Locke would have applied a notion of trust that governed private litigation in the
Court of Chancery to the public sphere.¹¹
It is much more likely that Locke’s notion of government as a public trust had
its roots in contemporary political discourse, including the charge that Charles I
had violated the trust placed in him and the Levellers’ frequent claim that the
elected members of the sovereign legislature were the trustees of the people.¹² His
theory of trust also had precedents, ironically, in the political theory of William
Barclay, the Scottish jurist who defended royal power against late sixteenth-
century Huguenot constitutionalists. In his absolutist treatise De regno et regali
potestate (1600) Barclay, “the great champion of monarchical power,” had also
recognized the right of the people to resist a ruler if he should act as an aggressor.
⁷ “It being as impossible for a governor, if he really means the good of his people. . . not to make
them see and feel it, as it is for the father of a family not to let his children see he loves and takes care of
them.” Locke, Second Treatise, para. 209; John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke (Cambridge,
1969), pp. 67–8 and n. 3.
⁸ Dunn, “Concept of Trust,” p. 287.
⁹ Trust in this sense could also be a person, as in Psalm 40:4, which reads “Blessed is the man who
makes the Lord his trust.”
¹⁰ See Frederic William Maitland, “Trust and Corporation,” in The Collected Papers of Frederic
William Maitland, ed. A.L. Fisher (Cambridge, 1911), vol. 3, pp. 321–404.
¹¹ On the difference between private and public fiduciary duties see Timothy Endicott, “The Public
Trust,” in Fiduciary Government, edited by Evan J. Criddle et al. (Cambridge, 2018), pp. 306–30.
¹² For the various sources of the concept of the trust, and its use by the framers of the United States
Constitution, see Robert G. Natelson, “The Constitution and the Public Trust,” Buffalo Law Review,
52 (2004), pp. 1077–178.
      
Locke quoted Barclay’s exceptions to the principle of non-resistance at length in

chapter 19 of the Second Treatise.¹³
Locke’s idea that government was itself a trust and that the representatives of
the people were its trustees became a frequent trope in the Anglo-American lib-
eral tradition.¹⁴ It can be found in the famous statement of James Madison that

governments are the “agents and trustees of the people” as well as in many other
comments by American political figures. These include a speech by the United
States senator Henry Clay in 1829, in which he proclaimed that “government is a
trust, and the officers of the government are trustees; and both the trust and the
trustees are created for the benefit of the people.”¹⁵
What is novel in Locke’s concept of trust is his application of traditional ideas
of trust in individuals to an increasingly centralized national government, run by
officials who were strangers to the subjects who had entrusted them with execu-
tive and legislative power. This distance between subjects and rulers—the fact
that people do not personally know the officials who run the government—has
become the main source of distrust in government from the eighteenth century to
the present day. It should be mentioned in this context that Aristotle and Cicero
wrote about the importance of trust in the political sphere, but their point of ref-
erence was the polis or city-state, in which most politically informed citizens did
know, at least by reputation, the people who governed them.
In any event, we can be certain that Locke’s theory of fiduciary government
owed little to Thomas Hobbes, who wrote three decades before Locke and who
was one of the theorists whom Locke criticized by name in the Second Treatise.
(His main target was Robert Filmer.)¹⁶ To be sure, Hobbes recognized the impor-
tance of trust in society and the corrosive effects of distrust. In describing the
endless competition among ambitious, competitive men without a government
Hobbes spoke of the prevalence of “diffidence,” which in seventeenth-century
parlance meant a lack of faith or trust. For Hobbes distrust also was the second
cause of war in the natural condition of man. In Hobbes’s hypothetical state of
nature, people could not trust anyone. The only antidote to this distrust was to
concede power to an absolute sovereign, who could maintain peace and stability
and guarantee covenants or contracts, which otherwise could be violated with
impunity. In the final analysis, therefore, Hobbes’s absolutist state depended upon
the untrammeled, perpetual power of the sovereign, personified as the biblical sea
monster Leviathan, whereas Locke’s fiduciary state was based on the people’s trust
¹³ Locke, Second Treatise, paras. 232, 239.

¹⁴ In that tradition an individual office rather than the entire government is sometimes referred to
as the trust.
¹⁵ James Madison, Federalist No. 46, 1788; Henry Clay, speech at Lexington, Kentucky, May 16,
1829, in Niles Weekly Register, 36 (1829), p. 399.
¹⁶ On Locke’s concern with Hobbes, see Felix Waldman, “John Locke as a Reader of Thomas
Hobbes’s Leviathan,” Journal of Modern History, 93 (2021), pp. 245–82.
       
in the government and the option of removing a sovereign who violated it. Trust
was central to both men’s hypothetical account of the establishment of a com-
monwealth. The main difference is that for Locke trust was central to the creation
of civil society, whereas for Hobbes it was its consequence. His argument that the
law imposed by the sovereign enabled people to trust echoed that of the ancient

Greek Neoplatonist philosopher known as Anonymous Iamblicus (245–325 ),
who wrote, “The first result of lawfulness is trust.”¹⁷ One can also contrast Hobbes’s
and Locke’s theories of government as a conflict between trust and power, a
dynamic that has repeated itself in politics and the economy ever since.¹⁸ In the
view of Locke and his fellow Whig, the minister George Lawson, power is granted
on the basis of trust.¹⁹ It would be difficult to argue that the authority of Leviathan
in Hobbes was based on trust; rather it was fear.²⁰
Lockean Theory in England and America

in the Eighteenth Century
The influence of Locke’s theory of government, and in particular his theory of

trust that underlay it, can be roughly divided into three periods. During the first,
which ran from 1689 until Locke’s death in 1704, Two Treatises of Government
either was considered too radical or did not make a convincing defense of the
Glorious Revolution. During the second period, from the first decade of the
eighteenth century to around 1760, references to Locke’s theory became more
frequent, mainly among the more radical Whigs who opposed the British govern-
ment during the period of the Whig Supremacy and American critics of the
British imperial government. The third period, from 1760 until the1790s, wit-
nessed a more complete reliance on Locke’s theory of revolution, both among
radical Whigs in Britain and American Patriots.
1689–1705
The main reason Locke published Two Treatises in the summer of 1689 was to
justify the Glorious Revolution. The book proved to be insufficient to the task.
¹⁷ Russell Hardin, “Trust in Government,” in Trust and Governance, edited by Valerie Braithwaite
and Margaret Levi (New York, 1998), p. 9.
¹⁸ Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power (Chichester and New York, 1979); Sally Clarke, Trust and
Power: Consumers, the Modern Corporation, and the Making of the United States Automobile Market
(Cambridge, 2007). On the corruption of trustworthiness by power see Annette Baier, “Trust,” in The
Tanner Lectures on Human Values, 1991, edited by Grethe B. Peterson (1992), p. 148.
¹⁹ George Lawson, Politica Sacra et Civilis (London,1689), p. 79.
²⁰ Peter Schröder, “Fidem observandam esse—Trust and Fear in Hobbes and Locke,” in Trust and
Happiness in the History of European Political Thought, edited by László Kontler and Mark Somos
(Leiden, 2018), pp. 99–117.
      
Of the some two hundred pamphlets written to justify the revolution between
1689 and 1694, only three mentioned Locke’s work or endorsed his interpretation
of the revolution, and two of those authors were friends or correspondents of
Locke.²¹ One reason for this dearth of early references to Locke’s work is that he
had written Two Treatises in the early 1680s to inspire resistance against Charles

II, and he had added only a few paragraphs toward the end of the Second Treatise
to make the case against James II. The book did not, therefore, make a compelling
case for the revolution, which was based mainly on legal grounds rather than the
principles of civil government. The fact that the book read primarily as an abstract
work of political philosophy and made very few direct contemporary references
also contributed to its failure to serve the purpose Locke had intended.
A more ideological explanation for the relative dearth of references to Two
Treatises in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution is that the Whig leaders who
supported the revolution were reluctant to endorse Locke’s radical manifesto. The
Whigs in the Convention Parliament and the parliaments of the early 1690s were
far more moderate than Locke and therefore minimized the revolutionary dimen-
sions of what had occurred after James had thrown the Great Seal in the Thames
and fled the country. The Whigs, who had a majority in the Commons but not the
House of Lords in the Convention Parliament, reluctantly accepted the Tory
argument that James had abdicated the throne, which thereby became vacant.²²
In so doing they abandoned the more radical claim that James had forfeited the
crown. That was in fact the position of the Scottish Convention Parliament, which
was dominated by Whigs. Accepting William of Orange as king might be viewed
as a legal or constitutional revolution, in that it violated the principle of indefeasi-
ble hereditary right, but it did not amount to a revolution in the modern sense of
the term, which is a change in the system of government rather than just its per-
sonnel. The word “revolution” in the late seventeenth century, moreover, referred
to a planet coming full circle in its orbit. That would mean that the events of
1688–9 amounted to a restoration of the traditional form of government rather
than a break with the past. In the view of most Whigs, the Convention Parliament
that declared William and Mary to be king and queen in February 1689 was, in
effect, the old English Parliament, reconvened now under exceptional circum-
stances. In their view the government of James II had not been dissolved, and the
Convention did not have the option, as Locke wrote, to change the form of
government, as the American revolutionaries were to do a century later.
Furthermore, moderate Whigs, who vied for power with the Tories during
those years, could hardly have endorsed a theory of government that sanctioned
²¹ J.P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party, 1689–1720 (Cambridge, 1977). Of the
three, James Tyrell was a friend and Matthew Tindal a correspondent. William Atwood had no contact
with Locke.
²² Kenyon, Revolution Principles, p. 200.
       
resistance, much less revolution under certain circumstances.²³ For them either
the prospect or the reality of power had made radical Lockean theory irrelevant,
if not anathema. Nor did Locke’s theory of popular sovereignty appeal to men
who had acquired or were acquiring the skills of influencing a relatively small
electorate and mastering the art of controlling Parliament. They could not sub-

scribe to ideas that had originated during the English Revolution of the 1640s and
had found their main theoretical support among the democratic Levellers.
A final reason for the relative sparseness of reference to Lockean theory in the
immediate aftermath of the Glorious Revolution is that William III, who together
with his wife, Mary, had replaced James at the time of the Glorious Revolution,
had difficulty building trust in his government, thereby rendering its legitimacy
problematic and Locke’s theory inapplicable. Rachel Weil has shown that the diffi-
culty William had building trust in his government lasted at least until 1696, and
a case can be made that the problem persisted for two more decades, when not
only other Whig governments but also other central political institutions, includ-
ing the Bank of England, had trouble securing the trust of the political nation.²⁴
William’s difficulty gaining that trust also supports the argument of this book that
central institutions staffed by “strangers” unknown to most people in local com-
munities usually have greater difficulty than local institutions building trust.
The relative neglect of Locke during the period 1689–1705 does not mean that
the Two Treatises were unknown during those years. Most Whig MPs may have
ignored or dismissed the book, but other Whigs expressed admiration for his
ideas. A popular Whig pamphlet titled Political Aphorisms (1690) summarized
and quoted extensively from the Two Treatises, while in the same year the Whig
pamphleteer William Atwood adopted some of Locke’s arguments in his
Fundamental Constitution. James Tyrell, one of Locke’s early Whig associates, also
quoted from the Two Treatises in his collection of political aphorisms, titled
Bibliotheca Politica (1692–4). There certainly was enough interest in the book to
justify a second edition in 1694 and a third in 1698. Somewhat ironically, the
most solid evidence of the book’s circulation in the 1690s comes from the Jacobite
propagandist Charles Leslie, who in a full-scale assault on Locke referred to him
as the “great oracle of the Whigs” and the most “acute and celebrated of the Whig
writers.”²⁵ There is considerable irony in the fact that Tories may have been more
responsible than Whigs for Locke’s entry into modern British political discourse.
²³ On Locke’s radicalism and his association with radical Whigs see Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary
Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Princeton, 1986).
²⁴ Rachel Weil, A Plague of Informers: Conspiracy and Political Trust in William III’s England (New
Haven, 2013), ch.2. Weil shows that the failure to build trust also affected informers, who are the main
subject of her book.
²⁵ Leslie, an Anglican priest and non-juror, made these comments in a series of issues of his weekly
journal, The Rehearsal of Observator, in 1705. M.P. Thomson, “The Reception of Locke’s Two Treatises
of Government, 1690–1705,” Political Studies, 24 (1976), pp. 184–91; J. Moore, “Theological Politics: A
Study of the Reception of Locke’s Two Treatises of Government in England and Scotland in the Early
      
1714–60
After the Whigs regained control of the government in 1714, references to Two
Treatises became more frequent, and some of those citations referred to Locke’s
theory of trust. Indeed, the first reference to the Second Treatise in Parliament

occurred in 1716, when the Whig MP John Snell, citing paragraphs 141 and 243,
argued that the Septennial Bill, which created a gap of seven as opposed to three
years between parliaments, was “not within the compass of the trust reposed in us
by the people.”²⁶ Locke’s fiduciary theory was also invoked to defend the right of
the people to petition and instruct MPs, who in the view of the Whig MP William
Pulteney in 1733, were their deputies and trustees.²⁷
The concept of government office as a public trust also surfaced in a number of
the impeachments of former Tory ministers after the Whigs returned to power in
1714. Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, who had been the secretary of
state in the Harley ministry, and James Butler, second duke of Ormond, who had
been the commander of the British forces in France, were impeached for high
treason and then, after fleeing to France, attainted in 1715. The main charge against
them was that, having been admitted into “places of the highest trust,” they had
violated that trust by entering into “a most treacherous confederacy with the min-
isters and emissaries of France” in 1713.²⁸ At the same time Robert Harley, the
former Tory minister, was also impeached for treason for his conduct in negotiat-
ing with the French at Utrecht. His denial that he was ever guilty of “any breach of
his oath or trust as High Treasurer of Great Britain,” coupled with the flagrantly
political rationale for the impeachment, convinced the Lords to acquit him in
1715.²⁹ The earl of Strafford was also impeached for high crimes and misdemean-
ors (although not treason) for violating his “duty and trust” to Queen Anne by
giving her “pernicious advice” in negotiating for peace with France at Utrecht
in 1713.³⁰ Strafford fell from power but was never tried.
Eighteenth Century,” in John Locke and Immanuel Kant, edited by M. P. Thompson (Berlin, 1975),
pp. 62–82. The first extended rebuttal of Locke’s argument appeared in the anonymous Tory pamphlet
An Essay upon Government (1705).
²⁶ The Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803 (London,
1816–20), vol. 7, pp. 328–9. In a speech before the House of Lords in 1710, the Whig Bishop Benjamin
Hoadly had made one reference to Locke’s First Treatise in attacking the patriarchalism of
Robert Filmer.
²⁷ William Pulteney, A Review of the Excise Scheme (1733), pp. 42–19, citing Locke’s Second Treatise,
paras. 149, 168, 221.
²⁸ “Proceedings on an Impeachment and Act of Attainder for High Treason against Henry Lord
Viscount Bolingbroke,” in Howell, State Trials, vol. 15, pp. 994–1006; “Proceedings on an Impeachment
and Act of Attainder for High Treason against James Duke of Ormond,” in Howell, State Trials, vol. 15,
1007–14. Bolingbroke was allowed to return to England in 1723, but Ormond died in exile.
²⁹ “Proceedings against the Earl of Oxford,” in Howell, State Trials, vol. 15, pp. 1046–194.
³⁰ “Proceedings against Thomas, Earl of Strafford,” in Howell, State Trials, vol. 15, pp. 1014–44.
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Distrust of Institutions in Early Modern Britain and America Brian P Levack Full Chapter

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Distrust of Institutions in Early Modern

Britain and America Brian P. Levack

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       

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I define an institution in the traditional sense of an organization, establishment,

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       

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episcopalian dissenters in Presbyterian Scotland in 1712 failed to dissipate much

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, ,   

years witnessed an exponential growth of state power, revolutions in Britain and

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       

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, ,   

One indication of the importance of trust in social intercourse is the frequent

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Trust, the Emotions, and Reason

I consider trust to be more of an emotion (or a feeling or sentiment) than a rational

       

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, ,   

rationally determines whether a person is trustworthy, and an affective component

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       

confidence, but not in another’s person’s character, ability, knowledge, or reliability.

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²⁴ G.T. Furlong, The Conflict Resolution Toolbox (Toronto, 2005), p. 143.

, ,   

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Trust, Virtue, and Morality

It is problematic to consider trust a virtue in the moral or ethical sense of the

       

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, ,   

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³⁹ See Mitchell, “Trust and the Overlapping Consensus,” pp. 19–25.

       

honesty or truthfulness. Locke considered trustworthiness as “the constitutive

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Trust and Freedom

Placing one’s faith or confidence in another person’s knowledge, ability, or judg-

, ,   

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       

subordination that Raleigh feared, is that if we abdicate a measure of our autonomy

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, ,   

Trusting public institutions also involves a greater surrender of autonomy and

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       

honest can be determined by fact-checking its public pronouncements, a rational

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, ,   

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Trust and Distrust in Medieval England

       

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, ,   

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