To specify these various contexts of trust in pre-modern cultures is not to say that traditional settings were comforting and psychologically snug, while modern ones are not. There are some definite respects in which levels of ontological insecurity are higher in the modern world than in most circumstances of pre-modern social life, for reasons I shall try to identify. Yet the settings of traditional cultures were in a generic way fraught with anxieties and uncertainties. I refer to these, taken together, as the environment of risk characteristic of the pre-modern world.

Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Moderni…, loc. 254