Moral canals : trust and social capital in the work of

This paper studies trust and social capital through the writings of three eighteenth-century philosopher-economists-Hume, Smith, and Genovesi. It compares their accounts of the sense in which trust can be said to be rational, the conditions under which rational trust is possible, and the economic and social institutions which reproduce those conditions. These accounts are related to the modern literature of philosophy and economics. It is argued that the eighteenth-century writers use conceptions of rationality that are now marginalised. Dispsositions as well as actions are treated as objects of choice. Genovesi, but not Hume or Smith, relates trust to reciprocal friendship in a way that is foreign to modern rational choice theory, but might be represented by a theory of plural agency ('we-rationality'). While Smith sees the commercial virtues as the product of economic development, Genovesi sees trust as an essential precondition for such development. * We are grateful to Nicolò Bellanca, Marco Guidi, Howard Sobel, the participants at a Bologna-Harvard-Cambridge Senior Seminar held in Bologna in January 1999, and two anonymous referees for comments on a previous version of this paper. It is a truism that a market economy cannot function without trust. We must be able to rely on other people to 2 respect our property rights, and on our trading partners to keep their promises. The theory of economics is incomplete unless it can explain why economic agents often trust one another, and why that trust is often repaid. There is a long history of work in economics and philosophy which tries to explain the kinds of reasoning that people use when they engage in practices of trust: this work develops theories of trust. A related tradition in economics, sociology and political science investigates the kinds of social institution that reproduce whatever habits, dispositions or modes of reasoning are involved in acts of trust: this work develops theories of social capital. A recurring question in these literatures is whether a society which organises its economic life through markets is capable of reproducing the trust on which those markets depend. In this paper, we look at these themes in relation to the writings of three eighteenth-century philosopher-economists: The writers we examine were contemporaries, writing in the period when modern economics was beginning to take shape. the leading figure in the equally remarkable Neapolitan Enlightenment. Although the Scottish writers are now much better known, scholarly economists recognise Genovesi and his …