When your cousins now do play a strong role in mediating our relations, I have reason for distrust. This is, of course, the point of Max Weber's thesis (1981, 228) on the rise of the modern business corporation and the invention of the idea of corporate capital of fourteenth century Florence: the resources and accounts of the individual get separated from those of the firm. It was also the original point of rules against nepotism that are now increasingly in abeyance when the relative who might work for a firm is not a brother or male cousin but a woman, especially a spouse.

XREF: Connects to Weber's thesis on the corporate form and the 14th-century Florentine invention of separating individual from firm accounts. QUESTION: Worth probing how modern nepotism rules have asymmetrically relaxed around women kin — what does that reveal about gendered trust assumptions?

Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, loc. 866