Trust and Political Agency

Trust is both a human passion and a modality of human action: a more or less consciously chosen policy for handling the freedom of other human agents or agencies. As a passion, a sentiment, it can be evanescent or durable. But as a modality of action it is essentially concerned with coping with uncertainty over time (Luhmann 1979: 30; Luhmann, this volume). A human passion, let us agree with David Hume, is an original existence (Hume [1739] 1911: 11, 127). Human beings can certainly affect their own feelings through time, by more or less ingenious strategic dispositions (Schelling 1984: chapter 9). But they cannot at a particular time simply choose these feelings. In contrast and on any defensible theory of the causation of human actions they can and do often and decisively choose their own policies and modalities of action. On a holist view, to be sure, these choices may in the last instance be made for them by structural features of the economic, political, or social setting of their lives (James 1984). But the most intrepid holist view denies merely the analytic or explanatory significance of individual choice. It does not (and, to be coherent, it must not) deny either the phenomenological reality or the causal efficacy of individual decisions as such. (To lengthen a causal chain is not to remove its later links.)