Trust — fides — was also, for anyone reared (as all eighteenth-century Italian theorists were) on Machiavelli, the necessary condition of all political association. Trust, wrote Doria in his Della vita civile of 1710, 'is the sole sustenance of states and leads to their stable maintenance' (1852: 352). Fede here is a purely social and a visibly public virtue. It is, in Genovesi's telling phrase, fede pubblica.

DEFINE: Fides/fede pubblica is defined as a social, public virtue — the foundation of states per eighteenth-century Italian theory.

Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking…, loc. 1729