Russell Hardin

The Street-Level Epistemology of Trust

Abstract Rational choice and other accounts of trust base it in objective assessments of the risks and benefits of trusting. But rational subjects must choose in the light of what knowledge they have, and that knowledge determines their capacities for trust. This is an epistemological issue, but not at the usual level of the philosophy of knowledge. Rather, it is an issue of pragmatic rationality for a given actor. It is commonly argued that trust is inherently embedded in iterated, thick relationships. But such relationships are merely one source of relevant knowledge in a street-level epistemological account. Early experience may heavily influence later capacity for trust. For example, bad experience may lead to lower levels of trust and therefore fewer opportunities for mutual gain.

Economic theories of the state

In rough outline, political economists have contributed to three categories of explanatory theories of the state based on arguments from, respectively, public goods, coordination, and evolutionary stability. The best known of these and the most extensively articulated are theories that build on public goods, in part perhaps because the theory of public goods has long been relatively well understood in a crude form, and in part perhaps because the public goods theory seems to yield not only an explanation for but also a justification of the state. In any case, the long tradition that grounds the state in the demand for public goods and in the states capacity to deliver such goods has been both normative and explanatory. The other two traditions are primarily explanatory and not normative. In its most literal variants, the public goods tradition supposes that people deliberately create the state in order to provide themselves with goods they could not individually provide for themselves, as, for example, by literally contracting to establish government. This bootstrapping move is circular if it is supposed that the state is itself a public good. In frustration at failing to provide ourselves some public good, we merely provide ourselves another that then provides us the one we failed to provide. Although it has not fully withered away and may occasionally betray signs of spontaneous regeneration, this branch of the tradition was finally cut off by Mancur Olsons argument of the logic of collective action (Olson 1965).

Hollow Victory: The Minimum Winning Coalition.

The proof of Rikers size principle is inadequate for the general class of zero-sum bargaining games (whether symmetric or asymmetric), and the principle is valid only for a very restricted class of games—the supersymmetric games and their asymmetric counterparts. Butterworths modification of the size principle (the maximum number of positive gainers principle) can be extended to cover games which are only approximately symmetric. Roll-call voting in the United States House of Representatives overwhelmingly violates the size principle; hence, the House does not generally play a supersymmetric zero-sum bargaining game. More generally, both Butterworths and Rikers principles seem inapplicable to large bodies.

Internet-Based Collaborations and Their Political Significance

In recent years, we have witnessed the notable accomplishments of numerous Internet-based large-scale collaborations, which typically rely on small contributions by many participants. In the first part of the paper we highlight the political relevance and significance of such collaborations, and we argue that Internet-based collaboration is turning into an important organizing principle for the production of a variety of goods by a range of political actors. In the second part, we analyze why the Internet is conducive for such collaborations and we focus on a number of factors, most significantly on the reduced costs of both individual contributions and the social organization of production, and on the large and excessive number of potential contributors attracted to focal collaborations.

Government without trust

There seems to be a declining public trust in government, and this decline may not be the symptom of a major problem. Rather, it may be the inevitable result of the declining role of government in the age of economic globalisation. It can be argued that the economic system has become so advanced that it has become highly independent from traditional state control and regulation, so public trust in government will naturally decline because there will be less need for it in the future than in the past. This perspective bears some significant implications for future research and practice concerning public trust in government.

Civil liberties in the era of mass terrorism

This paper discusses the impact of the so-called war on terrorism on civil liberties. The United States government in Madison’s plan was to be distrusted and hemmed in to protect citizens against it. The terrorist attacks of 2001 have seemingly licensed the US government to violate its Madisonian principles. While the current government asks for citizen trust, its actions justify distrust. The courts, which normally are the chief defenders of civil liberties, typically acquiesce in administration policies during emergencies, and it has been during wartimes that the worst infringements of civil liberties have occurred.

Contractarianism: Wistful thinking

The contract metaphor in political and moral theory is misguided. It is a poor metaphor both descriptively and normatively, but here I address its normative problems. Normatively, contractarianism is supposed to give justifications for political institutions and for moral rules, just as contracting in the law is supposed to give justification for claims of obligation based on consent or agreement. This metaphorical association fails for several reasons. First, actual contracts generally govern prisoners dilemma, or exchange, relations; the so-called social contract governs these and more diverse interactions as well. Second, agreement, which is the moral basis of contractarianism, is not right-making per se. Third, a contract in law gives information on what are the interests of the parties; a hypothetical social contract requires such knowledge, it does not reveal it. Hence, much of contemporary contractarian theory is perversely rationalist at its base because it requires prior, rational derivation of interests or other values. Finally, contractarian moral theory has the further disadvantage that, unlike contract in the law, its agreements cannot be connected to relevant motivations to abide by them.

Rationality, irrationality and functionalist explanation

In a provocative account Jon Elster argues that functionalist explanation is of little value in the social sciences (Elster, 1979, pp. 28-35). I wish to argue that on the contrary it is of great value, perhaps especially in making sense of some odd mixes of the rational and the irrational in social life. In particular, functionalist explanations make sense of certain collectively deficient outcomes in complex situations, of the creation and maintenance of various norms and porm systems, and of the institutionalization of conventions. For the first of these, individually rational actions produce collectively irrational results. For the second and perhaps the third, what would otherwise be simply dismissed as individually irrational actions are collectively reinforced to produce outcomes which may benefit an institutionally defined group but may also be generally detrimental to the interests of the larger society which supports that group. Finally, for the third, the convention which arises in a particular context may be explainable only with reference to various extra-rational considerations, but it may well seem to be collectively irrational in much the same way Elster suggests evolution may be irrational (Elster, 1979, pp. 4-18). The convention may seem to be a ’local maximum’ which an institution or society cannot readily abandon in order to seek a better outcome at an alternative convention which can be reached only after an initial setback.

Democratic Epistemology and Accountability

Most of the knowledge of an ordinary person has a very messy structure and cannot meet standard epistemological criteria for its justification. Rather, a street-level epistemology makes sense of ordinary knowledge. Street-level epistemology is a subjective account of knowledge, not a public account. It is not about what counts as knowledge in, say, physics, but deals rather, with your knowledge, my knowledge, the ordinary persons knowledge. I wish not to elaborate this view here, but to apply it to the problems of representative democracy. I will briefly lay out the central implications of a street-level epistemology and then bring it to bear on democratic citizenship, especially on the problem of the citizens holding elected officials accountable for their actions.

Acting together, Contributing together

Collective action typically takes one of two strategically distinct forms. One form is essentially acting together, as in a mob, in coordination on some purpose, which may not be defined in detail or readily changed. The other is contributing together in cooperation or exchange to generate resources that then may be used for collective purposes (although they may also be misused). Historically, much of the most important collective action was acting together; much of recent reformist politics in Western nations has been based in contributing together. There seem also to be distinctive differences across groups, especially across economic classes, in the forms of collective action they adopt. Most obviously, acting together is the resort of those, such as the poor and the young, who lack resources for contributing together. The rise of contributing together has accompanied the rise of a large and prosperous middle class.