It is a necessary precondition that the situation permits selective steps, meaning behavioural choices, and that behaviour is not already determined either institutionally or historically. Thus the first basic prerequisite for building up personal trust is that human actions are perceived in general as personally determined. Trust is founded on the motivation attributed to behaviours. Conduct on the experience of which trust depends must appear as an expression and reaffirmation of personality. However, only such actions as are treated institutionally as 'free' are imputed to personality. Firstly, there is freedom, in the, as it were, presocial sense of other people's uncontrollable potency to act – the source of the need for trust. Secondly, there is institutionalized freedom, namely freedom bound up with and moderated through the social order, freedom as a complex of actions or aspects of actions for which one is personally responsible, which is the source of the ability to learn trust. In order for trust to emerge and fulfil its function, freedom must be transferred from one form into the other.

DEFINE: Distinguishes 'presocial freedom' (uncontrollable potency, source of trust-need) from 'institutionalized freedom' (personally responsible actions, source of ability to learn trust).

Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, loc. 191