1. Adam Seligman (1997, 13–15) claims that trust as we know it is a strictly modern concept because it arises out of strictly modern conditions. This is a perhaps Platonic stipulation in its own right. Niklas Luhmann (1988, 96) makes a similar claim: “Trust comes with the discovery or reconceptualization of life as involving risk in early modern times.”

QUESTION: What specifically changed in early modern conditions that made trust possible or necessary? The risk-reconceptualization angle is worth chasing.

Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, loc. 899