This will presumably have to be something like 'thick trust' - reliance on and between a group of persons in terms of their known dispositions, personal relations, and so on. It is not easy to see how this could be extended beyond a very small society. The only apparent way of taking it beyond that is to identify a particular set of people, a government or elite group, in whom thick trust is invested, and whose activities, example, or regulation serve to sustain cooperative activities throughout the society; but if this is conceivable at all, I find it impossible to see how such a structure could be the basis of our arrangements without an arrant degree of traditionalist or charismatic mystification.

Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking…, loc. 219