Trust, Cohesion, and the Social Order

A touch of impatience can be discerned amongst realistically oriented colleagues in this series of essays: formal philosophers and economists have injected a certain a priori and deductive element into the discussion of trust. The description of the manner in which trust and hence economic vitality were deliberately destroyed by Neapolitan political authority is a welcome corrective (Pagden, this volume). I hope to continue in the same direction, by crossing the Mediterranean and attempting a similarly realistic analysis of a concrete society. I shall look at the way in which trust functions or fails to function in traditional Muslim society. I shall be leaning very heavily, as usual, on Ibn Khaldun (1958).