Civic Trust in Thucydides’s History

Abstract

In his recent book A History of Trust in Ancient Greece, Steven Johnstone emphasizes the ancient Greeks’ public, political effort to create trust in impersonal institutions. Although Johnstone confesses to being “enticed” to study trust by Robert Putnam’s investigations of personal networks of trust in civil associations—the famous “bowling alone” idea—he chooses to focus instead on the regime-level production of impersonal trust through systems of standardized coinage, impartial law, and structures of institutional accountability (such as audits).¹ Johnstone applies the sociological frameworks of Luhmann, Giddens, and others to the ancient polis, with a view to demonstrating that ancient (not only modern) institutions can render personal trust unnecessary or moot; impersonal trust is therefore not a specifically modern phenomenon.² In keeping with his social—scientific approach, Johnstone eschews sustained inquiry into the notion of trust as such; equally characteristic is that he understands systems of trust in a non-psychological way, as “sets of practices—what people did as opposed to their psychological dispositions.”³