Questions of how far personal trust is still needed today, in which social systems, and in which functions, would make a subject for extensive empirical research. Such research would, I suppose, indicate very quickly that the need to orientate oneself to other people's individual characteristics is as strong now as ever it was in all areas of social life where repeated contact takes place, and that the myth of mass society has its origins in some kind of optical illusion. On the other hand there is no doubt that modern differentiated social orders are much too complex for the social trust essential to ordinary living to be created solely by this type of orientation towards persons. It is all too obvious that the social order does not stand and fall by the few people one knows and trusts. There must be other ways of building up trust which do not depend on the personal element. But what are they?

QUESTION: Giddens poses an open question about what non-personal mechanisms build trust in complex societies — worth pursuing as a research thread.

Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, loc. 205