1

forthcoming in: Gilles Bouche (ed.), Reading Brandom’s “A Spirit of Trust”, London:

Routledge

Franz Knappik

From Brandom’s Semantics to Hegel’s Politics:

Institutional Preconditions of Trust

Robert Brandom’s semantic reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit culminates in an

account of an ideal form of reciprocal recognition that we are always already committed to

whenever we apply a concept, but that still awaits its concrete realization in an adequate

recognitive practice. This form of recognition consists in a complex mutual attitude of trust,

which centrally involves a willingness to offer rational reconstructions of past concept

applications. Through his account of this form of recognition, Brandom means to capture the

core of Hegel’s theory of the fully developed form of objective spirit, i.e., modern (or, in

Brandom’s terms: “post-modern”) ethical life.

Now it is well known that for Hegel, modern ethical life is possible only within a

rational State with a specific institutional shape.1 In other words, Hegel maintains that the

structure of modern ethical life has important consequences at the level of political

institutions. By contrast, Brandom does not specify any potential political implications of his

account of adequate recognition. So how can the view offered by Brandom be a plausible

reading of Hegel’s views about modern ethical life?

In this paper, it is my aim to assuage this worry by developing an argument that

bridges the gap between Brandom’s account of adequate recognition, and a Hegelian view of

political institutions. I hope to show (1) that the mutual attitude of trust that constitutes, on

Brandom’s reading, the ideal form of recognition can be implemented in the form of a stable

practice only if there are some political institutions at all; (2) that these political institutions

need to exercise a moderate protective function in order to make such a stable practice of trust

possible – they need to occupy a middle ground between anarchy and a surveillance State à la

Fichte; and (3) that Hegel’s political writings (both his early essays and the Elements of the

Philosophy of Right) contain fruitful resources for thinking about the features in virtue of

which political institutions can play this trust-enabling function – features such as subsidiarity

1 As the 1805 Jena Philosophy of Spirit shows, Hegel holds this view already in the period in which he writes

the Phenomenology of Spirit, even though the latter does not itself contain a proper account of modern ethical life.

2

and decentralization (which, as I will argue, are implications of Hegel’s “organicist” theory of

the State), transparency, and provision of welfare.2

I will proceed as follows. Section 1 summarizes the main relevant features of

Brandom’s reading of the final form of recognition in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Section 2

introduces some additional terminology that I will need in order to address issues of political

institutions in a Brandomian vein. Section 3 distinguishes different kinds of trust and

discusses their connections. I will argue that the specific form of trust that Brandom focuses

on – a form that I will call “hermeneutic trust” – requires a more general form of trust,

“unspecific ordinary trust”. Section 4 will offer an argument to the effect that “unspecific

ordinary trust” – and hence Brandomian “hermeneutic trust” as well – is possible only if there

are political institutions that exercise a robust but not excessive protective function. In

sections 5 and 6, I will identify more specific institutional requirements for the possibility of

trust and relate these requirements to Hegel’s political philosophy. Section 7 concludes.3

Before I begin, several caveats are in order. First, my argument will not aim to

demonstrate that the complete structure of Hegel’s State can somehow be derived from

Brandom’s reading of modern ethical life. Nor will the features of political institutions that I

will discuss amount to any full-blown account of a form of government, or allow one to

establish the sources of political legitimacy. I do not believe that such topics can be addressed

on the basis of Brandom’s semantic theory alone, without adding substantive further

assumptions to it.

2 Of course, the general strategy of deriving consequences regarding political institutions from a general theory

of discursive practices has a prominent precursor in Habermas. The Brandom-Hegel approach to the question differs substantially from Habermas’ both in its premises about discursive practices, and in its conclusions about political institutions. However, I shall not attempt here to compare the details and prospects of both projects.

3 I quote Hegel using the Theorie Werkausgabe (Werke in zwanzig Bänden. Edited by K.M. Michel and E. Moldenhauer. 20 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970) and, for the Jena Philosophy of Spirit 1805/6, the edition Jenaer Realphilosophie, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister, Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1969. With minor modifications, I use the following translations: Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen Wood, transl. H.B. Nisbet, Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press, 1991; The German Constitution, in: Political Writings, ed. Laurence Dickey / H.B. Nisbet, transl. H.B. Nisbet, Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 6-101; Hegel and the Human Spirit. A Translation of the Jena Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit (1805-6) with a Commentary. Ed. and transl. by Leo Rauch, Wayne State University Press, 1983. Page numbers refer to the German texts. – Fichte’s Grundlage des Naturrechts nach Prinzipien der Wissenschaftslehre is quoted with the volume and page numbers of the edition in Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, ed. Reinhard Lauth / Erich Fuchs / Hans Gliwitzky, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1962 ff., and using the translation Foundations of Natural Right according to the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre, ed. Frederick Neuhouser, transl. Michael Bauer, Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Hobbes’ Leviathan is quoted after Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck, Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press, 1996. I use the following abbreviations: Hegel: TW = Theorie Werkausgabe; EPR = Elements of the Philosophy of Right; PhS = Phenomenology of Spirit; Enc. = Encyclopedia; Fichte: GA = Gesamtausgabe.

3

Second, my argument is not meant to pull a rabbit of substantive normative claims

about politics out of a hat of harmless descriptive assumptions about semantics. I find

Brandom’s Hegelian views on the recognitive implications of concept-use fascinating and

extremely demanding at the same time. In that sense, the argument that I will offer is merely

intended to make a bit more explicit some of the normative strength that is already there in the

hat.4 By contrast, I will bracket from my discussion worries, both systematic and exegetical,

that one may well have with regard to this part of Brandom’s interpretation of Hegel. I have

raised such worries elsewhere;5 for the sake of the following discussion, I will simply build on

Brandom’s position on these topics.

Third, Brandom thinks that the transition to the final, adequate form of recognition has

still to be achieved and will force us to leave behind modernity. By contrast, the institutional

features that I am going to discuss are not at all revolutionary or utopian. Rather, they are

implemented to a substantial degree in modern democracies. But of course, realizing that

something which one finds rational and desirable actually already exists is itself a

characteristically Hegelian experience. And in any case, it might be that the necessary

institutional preconditions for adequate recognition are more or less in place, while we have

not yet managed to fully establish the interpersonal relations of reciprocal recognition that are

made possible by such institutions.

1. Brandom on trust

For Brandom, trust consists in a highly specific form of recognition that is part and parcel of

the innovative account of the social-pragmatic preconditions for the availability of semantic

content which Brandom locates in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Before we can ask what

the political implications of Brandom’s notion of trust are, it will be necessary to summarize

those elements of Brandom’s reading that are indispensable to understanding what he means

by “trust”.

1. Norms, normative attitudes, and recognition. For Brandom’s Hegel, the semantic

content of a concept is a matter of what we commit ourselves to when we use that concept in

order to make an assertion. Concepts are norms, and in following a conceptual norm – in

using a concept with a particular content –, we acquire a particular normative status.

According to Brandom’s reading of Hegel, there are two fundamental, complementary forms

4 Apart from one point in the argument (see note 50), where I add an anthropological assumption that is not

part of Brandom’s position. 5 In my Im Reich der Freiheit. Hegels Theorie autonomer Vernunft, Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, 2013, esp. 121-

135 and 452-461.

4

of normative statuses: authority and responsibility. Thus, when following a conceptual norm,

we have the responsibility to act in accordance with it. Correspondingly, the norm has an

authority over our behavior. Brandom ascribes to Hegel a view on which the possession of

normative statuses has to be explained in terms of normative attitudes – attitudes of granting

or claiming authority and of adopting or assigning responsibility. Moreover, Brandom’s

Hegel contends that norm-following is possible only in a social context, in which different

participants of a discursive practice adopt normative attitudes towards each other. According

to this view, I can bind myself by a norm (for instance, use a particular concept) only if I

interact with other persons who hold me responsible for acting in accordance with that norm.

For Hegel, normative attitudes that we adopt towards each other are forms of

recognition. For instance, by holding someone responsible for an action, I recognize him as

an agent who is capable of following norms, and who acknowledges the particular norms that

I use to assess his behavior. Fundamental to Hegel’s views on recognition is the idea that

recognitive relations are stable only if they are reciprocal. This is the case if the participants

recognize each other in a balanced way – if they create a community that is characterized by

an equilibrated distribution of normative burdens and rights, of responsibility and authority.

For instance, the relation between myself and the agent whom I hold responsible for his

actions will count as a relation of reciprocal recognition only if the agent recognizes me as

being in a position to assess his action – as having the required authority. But as we will

instantly see, a full account of the recognitive relations that we commit ourselves to when

employing conceptual norms will require us to describe a far more complex configuration of

recognitive relations.

2. The normative meta-attitudes of Edelmut and Niederträchtigkeit. On Brandom’s

reading, Hegel’s full account of the form of recognition that is required for the possibility of

concept-use (and hence, for the availability of semantic content) emerges as the result of an

extremely ambitious critical analysis that has as its subject-matter nothing less than the

history of discursive practices.

On Brandom’s reading, Hegel assumes that in addition to the first-order normative

attitudes which constitute, together with the corresponding behavior, discursive practices,

such practices can incorporate normative meta-attitudes. Such meta-attitudes are attitudes that

concern the relation between norms, on the one hand, and the (first-order) normative attitudes,

on the other hand, by which we grant norms authority and make each other responsible for

following them. In particular, Hegel distinguishes two such normative meta-attitudes, those of

Edelmut (roughly: magnanimity) and Niederträchtigkeit (roughly: pusillanimity). The meta-

5

attitude of Edelmut maintains that there really are norms that can bind us. By contrast, the

meta-attitude of Niederträchtigkeit holds that there are only merely subjective normative

attitudes: there are, according to this meta-attitude, no genuine, attitude-transcendent norms

that could “objectively” oblige us.

On Hegel’s analysis, it is a radical form of Edelmut that underlies ancient ethical life.

For it is characteristic of this form of discursive practice that the normative attitudes of

individuals, together with their corresponding behavior, are seen as mere manifestations of

norms that are simply there, without having to be instituted by normative attitudes. Yet

practices of this kind turn out to be unstable, according to Brandom’s Hegel, because they

rely on one-sided, unbalanced assignments of responsibility and authority, and develop into

modern practices. Modern discursive practices are based on the (implicit or explicit) insight

that norms are not simply given as part of the non-human world, but are instituted by

normative attitudes and practices. However, this dependence of norms upon normative

attitudes has often been taken (again, implicitly or explicitly) to exclude any converse

dependence of normative attitudes on norms. On the resulting view, norms are mere

projections of our subjective normative attitudes. This resulting view amounts to the meta-

attitude of Niederträchtigkeit. A particularly prominent form of modern Niederträchtigkeit

consists in reductive views about normativity – as advanced by many contemporary

naturalists, but also by the great “unmaskers” Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Foucault.

According to their version of Niederträchtigkeit, which may be called “reductivist

naturalism”, our behavior is never sensitive to norms and reasons. Rather, it is adequately

accounted for in terms of mere non-normative causes.

On Brandom’s reading, Hegel illustrates Niederträchtigkeit with the figure of the valet

for whom there is no hero – not because there really are no heroes, but because the valet is a

valet, whose acquaintance with the hero is limited to the latter’s ordinary, private side (PhS

3:489). It is true that the immediate target of Hegel’s discussion of the valet consists in a

rather different position, namely, the position on which we never act for the sake of duty, but

always only for egoistic motives.6 But Brandom thinks that this position – which may be

called “cynicism” – itself implies Niederträchtigkeit. He thus writes:

The selfish particular motives that are all the Kammerdiener attributes are

independently authoritative attitudes that can be reflected only in statuses such as

usefulness to private purposes, not in statuses such as duty, or being

unconditionally obligatory – in the sense that the obligatoriness is authoritative for 6 Thanks to Gilles Bouche for valuable feedback on this point, and for suggesting the terminology of

“cynicism” in this context.

6

attitudes, rather than conditioned on them, as in the hypothetical, instrumental

imperatives arising from prudent pursuit of privately endorsed ends.7

Elsewhere, Brandom even characterizes the valet’s cynicism as a “cardinal form” of

Niederträchtigkeit.8

These claims about the connection between Niederträchtigkeit and cynicism can seem

a bit surprising, as Niederträchtigkeit and cynicism are concerned with distinct questions: the

former stands for a family of views about the nature of normativity, while the latter is a view

about the motives on which we can act. In particular, one may wonder why it shouldn’t be

possible for a cynic to combine his view with a form of Edelmut and to hold that there are

attitude-transcendent norms (or irreducible reasons), while either insisting (a) that these norms

(or reasons) command egoistic behavior, or claiming that (b) insofar as these norms prescribe

non-egoistic behavior, they are never actually obeyed by real human agents. Despite such

worries, I think that at least a weakened version of Brandom’s claims about the connection

between cynicism and Niederträchtigkeit can be defended: namely, a version which holds that

the meta-attitude of post-modern Edelmut is incompatible with the position of cynicism. This

point will be important for my subsequent argument, but it requires some discussion in its

own right. I shall postpone this discussion to subsection 5.

Like the practices of ancient ethical life with their radical version of Edelmut, modern

practices with their reliance on the meta-attitude of Niederträchtigkeit are, on Hegel’s

analysis, ultimately unstable, because they crucially involve unbalanced, one-sided

distributions of authority and responsibility. In the case of modernity, the resulting instability

becomes manifest in various forms of alienation. Brandom reads the culminating section of

the Spirit chapter, Hegel’s account of moral conscience, evil, confession and forgiveness, as

arguing that in order to overcome alienation, modernity is forced to pass over into a new form

of discursive practice – a specifically post-modern form of practice, the transition to which

has still to be achieved. The core feature of post-modern discursivity is (or will be) its return

to the meta-attitude of Edelmut that had governed ancient ethical life. However, we will need

a version of Edelmut that is free from the deficits which had led to the collapse of the ancient

one. This version has to incorporate the modern insight that norms depend on normative

attitudes by acknowledging a reciprocal dependence between norms and normative attitudes,

and creating truly balanced assignments of authority and responsibility. More specifically,

consciousness learns in the dialectic of confession and forgiveness that whenever we attempt

to follow norms – whenever we make doxastic claims, aim to act for reasons, etc. –, we are 7 A Spirit of Trust, Part Five: From Irony to Trust (unpublished draft), 121f. 8 Ibid., 115.

7

always already implicitly committed to such an adequate, post-modern version of Edelmut. In

order to live up to this implicit commitment, we have to adopt a specific recognitive stance –

we have to enter into recognitive relations of a particular type –, and we have to create a new,

post-modern form of a recognitive community that incorporates the right kind of Edelmut.

The decisive questions at this point are what precisely the post-modern, adequate form of

Edelmut amounts to, and what the corresponding recognitive stance consists in.

3. Rational reconstructions. On Brandom’s account, the form of recognition that we

are always already implicitly committed to whenever we attempt to follow norms, and that

will be the key structural feature of the post-modern practice of Edelmut, is essentially a

historical form of recognition. It is defined by diachronic relations of recognition that we

create by offering rational reconstructions of each other’s utterances and actions. We offer

rational reconstructions of utterances and actions – in general: of concept applications – by

treating them as stages within a rational progress. We thereby reconstruct a tradition of

concept-use, such that different applications of a concept – different claims in which the

concept is involved, different attempts at realizing the concept through one’s agency – can

count as different versions under which one and the same conceptual content is grasped in

ever more determinate, explicit ways. Only then, claims Brandom, do we treat these

applications as instances of norm-following at all, rather than as mere effects of causal

circumstances. The upshot of this reading is a distinctively Hegelian apperception principle:

there is a historico-semantic consciousness that must be able to accompany all concept-use.

By offering rational reconstructions of concept applications, we establish a community

that is structured by diachronic relations of reciprocal recognition towards the authors of past

and future concept applications. These relations are explained by Brandom in terms of the

analogy of case law. A judge in a practice of case law has to justify his legal decisions by

exhibiting them as the results of a rational development which includes those past

applications that the judge acknowledges as precedential cases. In doing so, the present judge

treats the earlier decisions as authoritative, and assumes the responsibility to integrate them as

far as possible into a narrative that presents a progress leading to the present decision. At the

same time, the judge has authority over which past applications precisely he treats as

precedential. In his turn, the present judge grants future judges the authority to decide whether

her decision should count as precedential or not, and expects them to assume likewise the

responsibility of making the best of her own present decision. For Brandom, the same

complex configuration of diachronic relations of mutual recognition that articulates the legal

tradition of common law is required for traditions of concept-use in general. We therefore can

8

summarize that post-modern Edelmut consists in a willingness 9 to offer rational

reconstructions of concept applications, and to enter into the diachronic relations of mutual

recognition that are required for such reconstructions.

4. Brandom on trust. In a generic sense, Brandom uses “trust” in order to refer to the

entire, complex recognitive structure which post-modern Edelmut gives rise to. In a more

specific sense, “trust” stands for one particular element of this structure: namely, our

recognitive attitude vis-à-vis future concept-users. According to Brandom, the consciousness

that is edelmütig does not only grant future judges authority over the assessment of its

concept-applications. It also adopts a forward-looking attitude that amounts to a “petition for

forgiveness” – a normative expectation that the future judge will make the best of its present

concept-applications, and will integrate them as far as possible into a narrative of rational

progress. It is this expectation that Brandom calls trust in the more specific sense.

5. Egoism. By now, we are in a position to address a question that I had postponed

earlier, namely the question of whether there couldn’t be a version of cynicism – the view on

which agents always act only out of egoistic interest – that is combined with Edelmut rather

than with Niederträchtigkeit. There are two forms that such a combination could take.

(a) The first form of cynical Edelmut acknowledges attitude-transcendent norms, but

claims that these are egoistic norms which oblige agents to act only in their own interest

(regardless of whether or not the agents acknowledge this obligation). This form of cynical

Edelmut could itself come in two versions, which differ with respect to how they understand

the individual’s interest. On a first version, this interest would be defined in terms of the

individual’s actual desires. Agents are obliged to act, on this view, in whatever way they find

most desirable. It is quite clear, however, that this version would not really be a form of

Edelmut. It nominally accepts attitude-transcendent norms, but ultimately defines these norms

themselves in terms of the agents’ attitudes. Hence, this first attempt at formulating an

egoistic form of Edelmut is a failure, as the resulting position is really a version of

Niederträchtigkeit.

Second, the notion of interest could be understood in a more “objective” way, either

by combining reference to the agent’s desires with an additional condition (e.g., that of a

harmonized and instrumentally optimized set of desires which is connected through a

9 Here and in the following, I use “willingness” for a commitment to a behavioral pattern (in the widest sense)

that includes the ability to perform the requisite behavior, as well as a disposition to actually behave in this way. I suggest that it is these conditions of ability and disposition which set apart the realization of post-modern Edelmut in a concrete recognitive practice from the mere commitment to post-modern Edelmut that is implicit, according to Brandom, in all concept-use. While members of ancient and modern societies share such an implicit commitment, they are neither able nor disposed to live up to this commitment and to offer rational reconstructions in the full-blown sense, given the deficits of the practices they participate in.

9

“deliberative route” with the agent’s actual desires); or by introducing egoistic values that are

fully independent of the agent’s desires – for instance, bodily well-being, whose promotion

might be obligatory for an agent even if the agent doesn’t desire it (e.g., because he desires to

commit suicide). With respect to this proposal, it can be shown that it is at least incompatible

with the post-modern form of Edelmut envisaged by Brandom’s Hegel. For post-modern

Edelmut requires a recognitive practice that is articulated by mutual, balanced relations of

recognition, such that the participants of the practice reciprocally assign each other normative

statuses both of authority and of responsibility in an equilibrated way. Now it is plausible that

in order to be concretely implemented, these relations of recognition, and the normative

statuses that are assigned within them, need to have an impact on agency. In particular, the

authority which I assign to another person in a relation of reciprocal recognition normally will

involve some authority over the way I act. For instance, in recognizing you as a person who

owns a house, I grant you an authority to decide whether I am or not allowed to enter that

house, while taking upon me the responsibility of acting in accordance with that decision.

Generally speaking, in order to grant other persons normative statuses of authority, one has to

acknowledge that they have at least some rights and demands, and respect those rights and

demands in one’s own behavior. One may challenge each individual demand, but one cannot

in principle refuse respecting demands and rights of others: in that case, one would fail to

grant other persons any authority at all. But on a view on which there are only egoistic

reasons, such a principled refutation to respect other persons’ demands and rights would

exactly be something that is called for by the norms that bind the individual agent’s behavior

(namely, the relevant egoistic reasons). Hence, the second version of a cynical form of

Edelmut has the result that balanced relations of reciprocal recognition are, if not impossible,

at least necessarily in conflict with objective normative demands. But if Brandom’s Hegel is

right, we need to develop such balanced reciprocal recognition in order to live up to the

commitments that are implicit in any norm-following. Unless one is ready to hold that

objective norms make systematically contradictory demands on us, one has to conclude that

post-modern Edelmut excludes this version of cynical Edelmut, too.

(b) Alternatively, a proponent of cynical Edelmut could hold that while there are non-

egoistic attitude-transcendent norms, human agents fail to act on such norms. Even where

concrete human actions happen to be in accordance with the norms, they are always really

driven by egoistic motives. Again, we can distinguish two versions of this second form of

cynical Edelmut. The first version claims that human agents are simply incapable of acting

“out of the sake of duty”, or for non-egoistic reasons. An obvious problem for the resulting

10

position is that it contradicts the principle “ought implies can”. While this principle is not

universally accepted, it is sufficiently plausible to allow Brandom’s Hegel to reject the view

in question.

Second, a cynic who accepts the existence of objective non-egoistic norms could hold

that human agents are in principle able to act on them, but that they typically don’t do so.

Rather, their actions are normally motivated only by egoistic factors, even if they think and

claim otherwise. For the sake of our subsequent discussion, it will be useful to construct the

cynical component of this view as an interpretive stance. “Hermeneutic cynicism”, as we may

call it, is a pessimistic attitude that interprets other persons’ actions by default as driven only

by egoistic motives. This attitude is compatible both with the possibility of non-egoistic

action, and with the existence of non-egoistic norms. It merely holds that human beings

normally don’t act on such norms.

This is probably the most attractive and most widely held version of cynical Edelmut:

it combines commitment to non-egoistic normative demands with disillusionment about

human nature. But it can be argued that this view, too, is incompatible with post-modern

Edelmut and its requirement of symmetrical recognition. Hermeneutic cynicism implies that

human agents typically (even if not always) do not care about the rights and interests of other

persons. But as we have seen before, one cannot grant other persons normative statues of

authority unless one respects at least some of their rights and demands. Hence, hermeneutic

cynicism systematically interprets other persons’ behavior as precluding symmetrical

relations of recognition. Yet such a hermeneutic attitude itself undermines the possibility of

symmetrical recognition. Imagine a community whose participants share hermeneutic

cynicism. Even if an individual member A of this community really acts in respect of the

demands and interests of other members, this respect will not be perceived by those other

members, as they will interpret A’s action in egoistic terms. Correspondingly, they will react

to A’s action as if A really had failed to grant them authority: typically, they will see no need

to respect, in their turn, A’s interests and rights. As a consequence, such a community will be

systematically blind to any action in which the agent expresses an assignment of authority to

other agents. The community will develop exactly as if such an assignment would never take

place, and everybody claimed authority exclusively for themselves. Symmetrical relations of

recognition could develop in such a community at best by a very unlikely coincidence. We

should conclude that hermeneutic cynicism, too, is incompatible with post-modern Edelmut

and its demand for symmetrical relations of recognition.

11

2. A route from semantics to politics?

Brandom does not hesitate to ascribe political relevance to the account of post-modern

Edelmut with its corresponding recognitive structure of trust that he attributes to Hegel. He

writes that Hegel’s philosophy of language is of particular contemporary interest partly

because Hegel “attributes deep political significance” to his semantic and pragmatic

innovations,10 and that Hegel’s is an “essentially political, because social, account of the

nature of normativity”.11 But these claims stand in need of further development, which is not

provided by Brandom. It is clear that Hegel’s views on normativity, recognition, the social

dimension of spirit etc. are insofar “essentially political” as they lead him to formulate – most

explicitly in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right – a theory of political institutions,

namely, of the State and the more specific institutions that it consists of. There is no doubt

that Hegel would have subscribed to the idea that balanced, stable discursive practices and

corresponding forms of mutual recognition are possible only within the restored form of

ethical life that has the modern State as its foundation. But it is far from clear how any such

institutional implications follow from Brandom’s reconstruction of Hegel’s social pragmatics.

It is true that the social pragmatics which Brandom ascribes to Hegel entails that

particular social institutions are required for concept-use. For a social institution in this

context can be plausibly defined, in the primary sense of the term, as being an enduring norm-

governed social practice12 (whereas in derivative usages, the term can stand for normative

statuses, or a system of such statuses, that are bestowed upon persons and objects within a

social institution in the primary sense;13 or for artificial persons that are constituted within

social institutions in the primary sense14). In that sense, the practices of mutual recognition

that constitute, according to Brandom’s Hegel, the necessary context of norm-following are

social institutions. The problem is that not all social institutions can plausibly count as 10 A Spirit of Trust, Part Five, 78. 11 Ibid., 76. 12 “Enduring” because one-time or transitory realizations of social practices – for instance, a party with a very

special dress-code – wouldn’t usually count as institutions (even though they may be articulated enough to count as practices). The notion of a norm-governed social practice can be understood here in the sense of a coordinate set of normative attitudes – tokens of the complementary attitude types of ascribing and acknowledging authority and responsibility –, plus at least partly corresponding regularities in actual behavior, and dispositions for regular behavior, on the part of more than one subject. – This understanding of social institutions and practices draws (in a highly simplifying way) on Raimo Tuomela’s work. Cf. his “Collective Acceptance, Social Institutions, and Social Reality”, in: American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 62 (2003), 123-165, and The Philosophy of Social Practices. A Collective Acceptance View, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, chs. 4 and 6. Tuomela argues (e.g., “Collective Acceptance, Social Institutions, and Social Reality”, 131-141) that there are also cases of social practices that are not governed by any specific norms and that we still would call institutions – habitual collective actions like, for instance, the “social practice of blueberry picking in late summer” (ibid., 141). However, we can abstract from this weak sense of a social institution for our purposes.

13 E.g. money. 14 For instance, a government, a soccer club.

12

political institutions. Supermarket chains and the game of chess are social institutions in the

sense just specified, but we normally would not describe them as political institutions.

But what does it take for a social institution to be a political institution? This question

is not easy to answer, partly because it is notoriously difficult to define the notion of the

political. For our purpose, it will suffice to use a rough, and hopefully relatively

uncontroversial, characterization of political institutions that starts from the most

paradigmatic type of political institutions, the State (as well as broadly similar institutions,

such as the ancient polis; for the sake of simplicity, I will use the term “State” in a sufficiently

broad sense to include such institutions, too). In social-pragmatic terms, States can be

minimally characterized as follows: they are social institutions (enduring norm-governed

practices) within which artificial persons (i.e., artificial bearers of normative statuses; e.g., a

government, the police, law courts etc.) are created and maintained by being recognized as

having a very specific form of normative authority. We can call this form of authority State

authority. State authority can be seen as being defined by three parameters. First, State

authority is defined by a territory in which the State has authority (this may be called the

territoriality of State authority). Second, it is defined by a well-demarcated community of

members or citizens, over which it has authority15 (the civic nature of State authority). Third,

State authority comprises (at least) (a) the entitlement to stipulate norms16 that cover the most

important aspects of the citizens’ lives – aspects such as, for instance, physical intactness and

bodily freedom, property, education and subsistence (the comprehensiveness of State

authority);17 and (b) the entitlement to administer these norms, and to stipulate corresponding

sanctions – in particular, sanctions that include, or are backed by, the use of force (i.e.,

physical intervention in the spheres of the members’ property, bodily freedom, or even

physical intactness) (the legitimate enforceability of State authority)18,19. – If States in this

15 Where the criterion for membership typically is, or relates to, birth within the territory, and where

membership is normally possessed throughout the lifetime of a member. 16 These include not only laws, but also decrees, by-laws, etc. A boundary case consists in commands or

instructions that order only one token action. 17 For this aspect, see John Rawls, Political Liberalism, New York: Columbia University Press, 1993, 18. 18 Being social institutions in the sense introduced above, States do not exist unless there actually is an enduring

practice in which the above criteria are concretely implemented. In particular, this has the consequence that a State actually exists only if its members acknowledge its authority (as specified above) in practice. In its turn, this requires that the State possesses the actual ability to administer the norms mentioned in (a), and to carry out the sanctions mentioned in (b). – In addition, modern States typically claim a monopoly of legitimate force, i.e. their normative claims include the norm that no other natural and artificial person is allowed to use force within the State territory (normally, unless he acts in self-defense, or he (or it) has received a mandate from the State that includes a permission to employ force). But historically, such a claim to a monopoly of force is a relatively recent development. This speaks against including the monopoly of force in a definition of political institutions (as is done, for instance, by Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie, Frankfurt a.M.: Zweitausendeins, 2010, 39; cf. also

13

sense constitute the primary case of political institutions, the following can count as

secondary cases of political institutions: 1. functional parts of States (e.g., government, law

courts etc.); 2. communities of States; 3. further social institutions whose raison d’être it is to

enable individuals (the members or supporters of these institutions) to participate or intervene

in the exercise of State authority (for instance, political parties).20

So the question becomes now: does the social pragmatics of trust that Brandom

ascribes to Hegel have any implications with respect to social institutions that either

themselves possess territorial, civic, comprehensive, and legitimately enforceable normative

authority, or are functional parts of / communities of / institutional means to participate in

institutions that possess such authority? More specifically, we can distinguish the following

two sub-questions: (a) Is there reason to believe that we can establish trust as the final form of

recognition only if we also establish an institutional framework that includes institutions with

State authority? And, if it should turn out that there is such a connection: (b) Does the

possibility of trust put any constraints on how precisely institutions with State authority –

and/or functional parts of / communities of / institutional means to intervene in such

institutions –, should look like?

3. Variants of trust and their connections

In the first step of my argument, my aim is to show that trust in Brandom’s technical senses

(both in the generic and in the specific sense) presupposes trust in a more ordinary sense. I

will also briefly argue that the more ordinary sense is at the same time the core of Hegel’s

notion of trust, which will eventually enable me to relate the political presuppositions for trust

in Brandom’s sense to Hegel’s views about trust in section 6. – I will first offer an account of

two related ordinary notions of trust, then say something about its relation to Hegel’s notion

of trust, and finally argue that trust in Brandom’s sense requires trust in the previously

specified ordinary (and the Hegelian) sense.21

John Searle, Making the Social World. The Structure of Human Civilization, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, 171).

19 No institution can de facto possess such authority unless it institutes specific institutional roles, i.e. normative statuses that are possessed only by some members of the community (such as government officials), and that entitle them to carry out specific tasks regarding the stipulation, administration and sanctioning of the norms in (a). – Typically, State authority also includes an entitlement to administer (and to some extent, stipulate) norms that regulate the State’s own structures and procedures.

20 Cf. Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 40. 21 The notion of trust has received much philosophical attention in the last years, and I cannot hope to do justice

to that literature within this article. My aim is merely to specify notions of trust that match at least some important ways in which “trust” is ordinarily used, and that can be fruitfully connected both with Brandom’s notion of hermeneutic trust, and with Hegel’s notion of trust.

14

1. Following some recent attempts to analyze our ordinary usage of “trust”,22 one

important form of trust can be seen as consisting in a three-place relation that obtains between

the person who trusts (“trustor”), a trusted person (“trustee”), and a specific object of trust –

usually an action or range of actions (including omissions) on the part of the trustee (“φ”).23

When we refer to a concrete instance of trust in this sense, we sometimes explicitly indicate

the object of trust (“I trust that he will return me the money I have borrowed him”). In other

cases, a specification of the object of trust is implied (“I trust my car seller” – that is, I trust

that he does not cheat me when he sells me a car).

Both cases contrast with other cases in which we speak of trust without confining the

relation of trust to a specific range of actions within a particular cooperation or the like. We

can call this latter kind of trust unspecific trust, and the previous form (where explicitly or

implicitly, an object of trust is specified) specific trust. It is important to note that unspecific

trust is usually not entirely unrestricted (that is, it is not blind trust). For instance, there are

many people whom I generally trust, while I would not, for instance, lend them all my

savings.24 We can interpret unspecific trust as a two-place relation between the trustor and the

trustee, and hold that this relation obtains if and only if the trustor has a disposition to enter

into a (three-place) relation of specific trust vis-à-vis the trustee and with regard to a specific

object whenever a relevant occasion presents a candidate object of trust, minus those cases

that would be extremely risky for the trustor. Let us also stipulate that unspecific trust obtains

only if, notwithstanding this latter restriction (“minus those cases…”), there is still a

substantial spectrum of actual or possible actions that can figure as object of specific trust.

It will be important for our subsequent argument that the unspecific variant of ordinary

trust can itself occur in a generalized form: one can trust, or fail to trust, the members of a

particular group, or even other people in general. This generalized form of unspecific ordinary

trust can be analyzed as two-place relation where the position of the trustee is occupied by a

bound variable that is generically quantified25 over a relevant group (e.g., the persons living

or staying in the same country as the trustor). In its turn, such a relation of generalized trust

can be understood as a disposition on the part of the trustor to enter into relations of specific 22 For overviews of the recent literature on trust, see Bo Rothstein, “Trust and Social Capital”, in: Robert

Goodin, Philip Pettit, Thomas Pogge, eds., A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, 2nd ed., Malden et al.: Blackwell Publishing, 2007, vol. 2, 830-841, and Carolyn McLeod, “Trust”, in: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2015 Edition), ed. by Edward Zalta, online: <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2015/entries/trust/>, accessed 20/5/2016.

23 Cf., e.g., Annette Baier, “Trust and Antitrust”, in: Ethics 96 (1986), 231-260, here: 236; Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 9; Raimo Tuomela / Maj Tuomela, “Cooperation and Trust in Group Context”, in: Mind and Society 4 (2005), 49-84, here: 71 f.

24 Cf. Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 9. 25 “Generically” because there typically will be exceptions – group members where there is strong reason to

believe that trusting them would be very dangerous.

15

trust whenever an appropriate situation arises (i.e., a situation that presents a particular

individual as candidate trustee, together with a particular object of trust; again except for

extremely risky cases).

Given the significance of generalized forms of trust for our argument, we will have to

adopt a perspective on the notion of trust that significantly differs from the predominant one

within the recent philosophical literature on trust. For the recent literature typically restricts

the notion of trust to such forms of trust that presuppose a substantive personal relationship

between the trustor and the trustee. Thus, this literature generally distinguishes trust from

mere reliance – an attitude that we can have towards anything, animate or inanimate, that

displays a regular behavior –, and uses as test case for this distinction the alleged fact that

someone who trusts can be betrayed in his trust, while someone who merely relies on a

regularity can at best be disappointed.26

Yet it is important to notice that this restriction of the notion of trust is not mandatory.

For it can be argued that feeling betrayed is an appropriate reaction only if one feels that the

trustee owed one a particular behavior because of one’s mutual personal relation, while at the

same time there are forms of trust – as opposed to mere reliance – which do not presuppose

such a personal relation.

For instance, if the stranger on a dark and lonely street who had stopped me to ask for

an information, and whom I had decided to trust, turns out to be a thief who grabs my wallet

and runs away, I can feel stupid for not having been more prudent, and feel resentment against

the thief; but a feeling of betrayal would not seem to be an appropriate reaction. By contrast,

if I discover that an acquaintance of mine has stolen my wallet while he was visiting me for a

coffee, it is appropriate for me to feel not only resentful, but also betrayed. In the first case,

my resentment is based on the fact that there are moral and legal reasons for which the thief

owed me a different behavior. In the second case, there are further reasons which should have

kept the other person from robbing me – reasons that arise from our personal relationship.

This additional, personal source of reasons is apt to explain why one can appropriately feel

betrayed in the second, but not in the first case.27, 28 At the same time, it is natural to describe

my initial attitude towards the stranger on the street in the first case as one of trust. Moreover,

this attitude goes beyond a form of mere reliance that can have just any regularity as its target.

26 This point goes back to Baier, “Trust and Antitrust”, 235. 27 In addition, it seems that in order for feelings of betrayal to be appropriate, I must believe that the trustee had

known about the trust I placed in him. If this observation is correct, this would be a further restrictive condition that is not spelt out in the relevant literature.

28 Zac Cogley, “Trust and the Trickster Problem”, in: Analytic Philosophy 53 (2012), 30-47 similarly ties betrayal to personal relationships. However, Cogley restricts the notion of trust to cases where betrayal can become appropriate, whereas I don’t.

16

For where mere reliance on the regular behavior of inanimate things is frustrated, genuine

feelings of resentment are normally inappropriate.

Contrary to much recent philosophical work on trust, we therefore should allow for

forms of trust which can emerge outside of established personal relationships; whose

frustration does not necessarily support feelings of betrayal; and which nevertheless are

distinct from mere reliance. When it comes to understanding generalized trust, we need to

build on a notion of trust that does not exclude such less demanding, anonymous forms of

trust.

Bearing this point in mind, we can still draw on established accounts of trust in order

to analyze the wider notion of trust, provided that we weaken those accounts where necessary.

Like full-blown, personal trust, less demanding forms of trust are plausibly seen as involving

a doxastic element on the side of the trustor. Following an influential proposal by Annette

Baier,29 we can characterize this doxastic element for the case of specific trust as an attitude

by which the trustor ascribes to the trustee a policy of goodwill vis-à-vis the trustor, at least as

far as the object of trust is concerned. But while the notion of goodwill in the context of

demanding, personal trust is often itself understood in a way that presupposes established

personal ties,30 we can adopt for our purposes a weaker reading, according to which the

trustee acts in goodwill vis-à-vis the trustor if and only if she respects the trustor’s rights and

legitimate interests.31 On the resulting view, the trustor has an affirmative doxastic stance on a

propositional content of the following kind:

(P) The trustee has acted / is acting / will act, as far as his or her φing is concerned, in

goodwill vis-à-vis the trustor,

where “φ” stands again for the object of trust. (Note that normally, this will entail an

affirmative attitude towards the content that the trustee actually has φed / is φing / will φ –

e.g., that he will give the borrowed money back to the trustor.)

What kind of doxastic stance towards contents of the form (P) is required for the

doxastic element of ordinary trust? One possibility is that trust requires a personal-level

mental state like belief in, or acceptance of, such a content. Yet one may well wonder if such

a mental state is really needed. Take, for instance, the following case: upon receiving the

change from the cashier in the supermarket, I put it in my pocket without counting it – not 29 Baier, “Trust and Antitrust”, 234f. Cf. also, e.g., Tuomela/Tuomela, “Cooperation and Trust in Group

Context”, 72; Cogley, “Trust and the Trickster Problem”. – For situations in which no legal system is available that defines the rights and legitimate demands of individuals, the notion of goodwill might be roughly spelt out as respect for the physical intactness, physical freedom, and the possessions of others.

30 E.g., Karen Jones, “Trustworthiness”, in: Ethics 123 (2012), 67. 31 Of course, this still leaves open different possibilities for understanding goodwill. I will come back to this in

section 4 below.

17

because I am absent-minded, but because I trust the cashier. It seems that I can stand here in a

relation of trust towards the cashier with a specific object (the payment of the correct amount

of change) even if I have not processed, either consciously or unconsciously, questions such

as whether the cashier has given me the right amount, whether I should check the change etc.,

and have not formed (again, consciously or unconsciously) a corresponding state of belief or

acceptance. Counting the change may simply not be a “live option” for me (nor for my

unconscious cognitive mechanisms), perhaps because I have a good general attitude towards

this supermarket and because the due change is only a very small amount of money anyway.

All that seems necessary for trust in this case is that (a) I have a disposition to form beliefs in

(or accept) a content of the form (P) without examining further evidence as soon as I am

confronted with an explicit question about it, and (b) I have a corresponding disposition to act

as if the relevant content is true.32 For the sake of simplicity, I will refer to all situations in

which the trustor either has the dispositions (a) and (b), or actually displays the relevant

beliefs and actions, as situations in which the trustor treats the appropriate contents as true.33

Finally, it has been argued that counting on someone else’s goodwill cannot be

sufficient for trust because it does not rule out “trickster” cases, where A counts on B’s

goodwill only in order to exploit it, and does not really trust B.34 But if goodwill is

understood, as I have proposed, as respect of the trustor’s rights and legitimate interests, the

above account is sufficient to exclude such cases. For it follows from this account that the

trustor treats as true the proposition that the trustee owes goodwill to her, or that she is entitled

to this goodwill (either for moral, legal or similarly general reasons, or because of a mutual

personal relationship).35 By contrast, the fact that the trickster counts on a particular attitude

on the side of his victim only in order to exploit it is plausibly seen as “canceling” any

entitlement to this attitude.36 The trickster therefore cannot reasonably think that his victim

32 Quite generally, dispositions to believe can perform many of the functions that are otherwise ascribed to full-

blown beliefs: cf. Robert Audi, “Dispositions to Believe and Dispositional Beliefs”, in: Noûs 24 (1994), 419-434.

33 In the case of unspecific trust, the dispositional variant of such treating as true need not be understood in the sense of an iterated disposition, such that the unspecific trustor has a disposition to have (or acquire) a disposition to believe the relevant contents, and to act as if they are true. Rather, we can analyze this case by saying that the trustor is disposed to believe relevant instances of (P) whenever an occasion arises, except for extremely risky cases. For the sake of simplicity, I will nevertheless use the formulation of “treating as true” for the case of unspecific trust, too.

34 Richard Holton, “Deciding to Trust, Coming to Believe”, in: Australasian Journal of Philosophy 72 (1994), 63-76, here: 64.

35 To emphasize this, we might also formulate (P) by saying that “The trustee has acted / is acting / will act, as far as his or her φing is concerned, in due goodwill vis-à-vis the trustor”.

36 I am drawing here on the account proposed by Cogley, “Trust and the Trickster Problem”. Cogley thinks that the felt entitlement to goodwill must be based on the personal relationship between the trustor and the trustee. Once more, this is because his is an account that restricts trust to its more demanding forms in the context of personal relations.

18

owes him goodwill. Rather, his “counting” on the victim’s goodwill will normally consist in

predicting a behavior that the trickster would be entitled too, if he were sincere. Hence, the

above account leaves space for the possibility of a trickster who does not trust his victim.

It is not clear whether treating a relevant instance of (P) as true is necessary for trust.

There may be other forms of trust that do not involve any ascription of goodwill.37 But our

subsequent argument will turn only on sufficient conditions of trust, and it seems reasonable

to claim that A’s treating a relevant instance of (P) as true with regard to a given person B and

a given object of trust φ suffices for a relation of specific trust (A; B; φ) to obtain – as long as

we keep in mind that we do not restrict the notion of trust to the more demanding forms of

trust within established personal relationships.38

We therefore can summarize as follows. Specific ordinary trust is a relation

trust(trustor; trustee; φ) that obtains if the trustor treats the corresponding instance of (P) as

true. By contrast, unspecific ordinary trust is a relation trust(trustor; trustee) that obtains if the

trustor is disposed to treat relevant instances of (P) as true whenever an occasion arises,

except for extremely risky cases.

2. Hegel, in his writings on political philosophy – from the early sketches on the

German Constitution to the Jena and the Encyclopedia Philosophies of Spirit and the

Elements of the Philosophy of Right –, assigns the notion of trust (“Zutrauen” or “Vertrauen”)

a pervasive, albeit often neglected, role.39 Thus, in the Jena Philosophy of Spirit of 1805/6,

Hegel writes: “The absolute trust is the ground and the element of the State” (254). And

according to the Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trust is the “political disposition” (EPR

§268), the subjective dimension of modern ethical life in a rational State. In the same

paragraph of the Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel goes on to define trust as the

“consciousness that my substantial and particular interest is preserved and contained in the

interest and end of an other” (EPR §268). I bracket for the moment Hegel’s talk of a

“substantial” and a “particular” interest – we will come back later to the question how these

two species of interest can be understood. That my “interest is preserved and contained in the

interest and end of an other” seems to mean that it is among the goals of the other person or

institution to actively promote my interest. Taken on its own, this could be understood in an

entirely egoistic sense: given the circumstances, it could just be the most useful thing to do for 37 Cf. Holton, “Deciding to Trust, Coming to Believe”, 64. 38 Again, I would argue that those authors who think that there are additional requirements for trust – e.g., an

expectation on the part of the trustor that the trustee will or would be favorably moved by the thought that the trustor counts on her (Karen Jones, “Trust as an Affective Attitude”, in: Ethics 107 (1996), 4-25) – have in mind the more demanding notion of trust.

39 For a thorough analysis of Hegel’s notion of trust, cf. Won Jun-Ho, Hegels Begriff der politischen Gesinnung. Zutrauen, Patriotismus und Vertrauen, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann 2002.

19

the other to act in a way that also promotes my interest.40 As we will see later, Hegel excludes

such a view of trust. Hence, we should assume that the “preservation” and “containment” of

my interest within that of another agent are to be understood in the sense of an attitude of

goodwill that the other has towards me, even though this requires her to refrain from some of

her own advantages. At the same time, it is also charitable to assume that Hegel’s talk of

“interest” in this connection is restricted to interests that are backed up by rights, or interests

one can legitimately demand the other to respect. For instance, in situations of competition

(e.g., the market economy), it would be inappropriate for me to expect that my competitors

act in a way that is always also useful for me. Rather, what I can expect from them is that they

act legally, and hence, respect my interests insofar as they are protected by the legal

institution of “abstract right”.

If these qualifications are accepted, it follows that Hegelian trust involves a way of

treating a content of the kind (P) as true (“consciousness”). Moreover, the lack of a

specification of the object of trust can be plausibly be understood here in the sense of

unspecific ordinary trust. Hence, trust, as defined by Hegel, can be read as being roughly

equivalent to what we have called above “unspecific ordinary trust”.

Given this preliminary account of Hegelian trust, we can now characterize Brandom’s

specific notion of trust – the expectation that future concept-users will adopt a stance of

Edelmut towards me, and rationally reconstruct my concept applications – as a particular

subtype of ordinary trust, and hence a restriction of Hegelian trust (that is, of unspecific

ordinary trust): a subtype where the object of trust, φ, is the recognitive stance of Edelmut, the

willingness to offer rational reconstructions, on the part of the trustee(s).41 As this subtype of

trust is concerned with the trustee’s interpretative or hermeneutic stance towards the trustor,

we can also dub it hermeneutic trust.

3. I next aim to argue that hermeneutic trust is possible only if the trustor also has an

attitude of unspecific ordinary trust with regard to the trustee:

(1) For all x and y: hermeneutic trust(x;y) can obtain only if unspecific ordinary

trust(x;y) obtains.

The first step in the argument consists in a premise that follows from Brandom’s full account

of post-modern Edelmut: the recognitive relations in the resulting complex structure of

recognition that are required for a realization of Edelmut are reciprocal; hence, I must myself

40 This would be very similar to Hardin’s “encapsulated interest” view of trust (Hardin, Trust and

Trustworthiness, e.g. 4). 41 By contrast, Brandom’s generic notion of trust – which stands for the entire complex recognitive

constellation required for Edelmut – has that subtype of ordinary trust as one of its elements; it is not itself a subtype of ordinary trust.

20

be willing to offer rational reconstructions for the concept applications of the persons to

whom I stand in the relation of hermeneutic trust. Call this willingness the attitude of charity

(as it amounts to a willingness to offer charitable interpretations). Thus:

(2) For all x and y: hermeneutic trust(x;y) obtains if and only if charity(x;y) obtains.

Of course, charity has concrete consequences only where I actually interact with the future

concept users. Regarding those who may assess my concept applications in a far future, my

willingness to offer rational reconstructions amounts to the more abstract attitude of granting

them the authority to rationally evaluate my behavior. It would not be plausible to hold that

this attitude has any preconditions on the level of political institutions. I therefore will restrict

the subsequent discussion to the case of trustees whom we can actually interact with.

The next, and decisive, step is to show that I can be willing to offer rational

reconstructions of the trustees’ behavior – stand to them in a relation of charity – only if I also

stand to them in a relation of unspecific ordinary trust:

(3) For all x and y: charity(x;y) obtains only if unspecific ordinary trust(x;y) obtains.

In order to establish (3), I will argue that a practice of post-modern Edelmut – and hence, a

practice articulated by hermeneutic trust and charity – requires its participants to adopt a

specific hermeneutic stance: a stance that interprets other persons standardly and as far as

possible as acting in goodwill, or as respecting the legitimate demands of other agents. As we

will see, this stance is naturally understood as being sufficient for a relation of ordinary

unspecific trust.

The first step in this argument is to show that the charity required by post-modern

Edelmut excludes a stance that standardly interprets other persons’ actions in egoistic terms.

Given our above discussion of the incompatibility between post-modern Edelmut and various

possible forms of cynical Edelmut, this can be easily demonstrated. For such a stance

coincides with what we had called “hermeneutic cynicism” there. Since we have seen that

post-modern Edelmut excludes hermeneutic cynicism, it follows that charity within a practice

of post-modern Edelmut, too, leaves no space for hermeneutic cynicism. In other words, such

charity has to consist in an interpretive stance that resorts to egoistic interpretations only as a

last resort.

Next, we have to argue that charity excludes, too, hermeneutic stances which

standardly interpret actions as being both non-egoistic and lacking goodwill, or respect for

other persons’ interests and rights. In order to provide such an argument, we have to

distinguish different forms of non-egoistic behavior, and show that only an attitude that treats

non-egoism and goodwill as hermeneutic default lives up to the requirements of Edelmut.

21

Here is a first way in which a non-egoistic action can fail to be carried out in goodwill:

it may be partial, that is, the action may take into account the rights of some other persons,

while showing no respect regarding those of all the others. Second, a non-egoistic action may

be fanatical – the agent may be indifferent both with regard to his own and other persons’

rights and interests, and merely act on behalf of some value or idea that he takes to overrule

all individual concerns. Together, the cases of partial and of fanatic action exhaust the

possibilities for non-egoistic agency without goodwill 42 : either the agent respects the

legitimate demands of some other persons (partial action); or he respects the legitimate

demands of no person at all (fanatical action); or he respects the legitimate demands of all

other persons – but in this latter case, he acts in goodwill.

Now while the actual behavior of a person may force us to interpret it as partial or

fanatical, charity demands us to try to understand it, if possible, in other, non-partial and non-

fanatical ways. Remember that according to Brandom, the relations of recognition involved in

hermeneutic trust are reciprocal and contain symmetrical assignments of responsibilities and

authorities. Someone who pursues a partial or fanatical policy ipso facto opts out of such

reciprocity. By ignoring partly or entirely the interests and demands of others, fanatic and

partial agents claim for themselves an authority over how they can and should act that is not

balanced by a corresponding assignment of authority to other agents. It is true that partial or

fanatic agents may still grant some authority to others. For instance, a fanatic agent may defer

to the verdict of a “guru”, or respect the opinion of a fellow fanatic, when it comes to deciding

how the shared ideals should be realized. And a partial agent does grant authority to those

whom he has decided to respect. But in each case, such assignments of authority to other

agents will take into account only a limited number of agents. They therefore fail to establish

a comprehensive practice of mutual recognition. This has an important consequence for a

hermeneutic stance that interprets other persons as fanatic or partial agents: if I understand

other persons this way, I thereby undermine the very point of my charity toward them. For it

was the point of this charity to establish and cultivate reciprocal relations of recognition.

Hence, to interpret an action as partial or fanatical (like interpreting it as egoistic) can only be

a last resort for a charitable interpreter.

As we have already seen, there remains therefore only a third option for charity:

namely, that the agent whom I am interpreting respects at least in principle the legitimate

42 I am assuming here that an agent needs to be sensitive at least to some interests and/or demands. Intuitively, a

totally indifferent person à la Oblomov is either not an agent at all, or at best an agent in a very reduced sense.

22

demands of other agents in general, and acts in goodwill toward them. It follows that a

charitable interpreter needs to be willing to interpret other persons’ behavior, as far as

possible, as following an attitude of goodwill towards others.

A presumption of goodwill must therefore be the default view of other persons’

motivational structure if we are to have the attitude of charity towards them. Now given what

we have said above about unspecific ordinary trust, it is very plausible to conclude that the

presumption of goodwill that the charitable interpreter holds towards other agents is sufficient

for a generalized relation of unspecific ordinary trust to obtain, with the interpreter as trustor

and the other agents as trustees. For in every concrete situation that constitutes an occasion for

entering a relation of ordinary specific trust with another agent, the interpreter will by default

understand the other agent’s behavior (both actual and potential) as following a policy of

goodwill towards others (including the interpreter herself). To do so suffices for the

interpreter to treat a relevant instance of (P) as true. Her general interpretive stance therefore

entails a disposition to enter relations of specific ordinary trust with other agents, as soon as

there is an occasion for it (and again, minus the extremely risky cases). Hence, the charitable

interpreter ipso facto has a generalized attitude of unspecific ordinary trust towards other

agents in general.43

(One might object that every given situation may contain elements that defeat the

charitable default attitude, so that the interpret will fail to actually enter into a relation of

specific ordinary trust on that occasion. But the same holds for unspecific ordinary trust: we

have defined this notion in terms of a disposition to adopt specific ordinary trust in given

situations, and this disposition can fail to be manifested if the conditions are too adverse.)

We thus have established (3), which, together with (2), entails (1) – the claim that

hermeneutic trust requires unspecific ordinary trust.

4. Trust and political institutions

The next task is to show that a collective practice of unspecific ordinary trust can be stably

maintained only if there are political institutions. If this could be established, it would follow

that the concrete realization of post-modern Edelmut with its attitude of hermeneutic trust,

too, requires a background of political institutions.

I have already emphasized earlier that we are concerned here with generalized forms of

trust. The relations of hermeneutic and unspecific ordinary trust in question are relations

43 It is plausible to assume that the reverse connection holds, too: the ascription of goodwill that is sufficient, on

the above account, for trust may require the trustor to favor interpretations of the trustee’s behavior which are optimistic about the latter’s goodwill (cf. Jones, “Trust as an Affective Attitude”, esp. 11f.).

23

where the position of the trustee is replaced by a bound variable that is generically quantified

over concept users who can in principle interact with the trustor. In the present context, it is

important to bear this in mind because the existence of non-generalized, personal relations of

hermeneutic and unspecific ordinary trust in a context that is devoid of political institutions

seems unproblematic. For instance, such individual relations of trust can be a consequence of

personal relations of love or kinship that do not require any political institutions.44 But such

individual relations of trust do not suffice to establish a practice of post-modern Edelmut. Not

only will the members of a practice of post-modern Edelmut be only partly connected through

personal bonds, the trustees of the requisite relations of trust will in any case include persons

whom the trustor is not personally acquainted with.

In arguing for the role of political institutions as precondition for the realization of post-

modern Edelmut, I will take my cue from one strand in classical contractarian thought.

According to authors like Hobbes, individuals are rationally bound to acknowledge State

authority because this is necessary for instituting a very specific form of corresponding State

responsibility: a responsibility on behalf of the State to enable its citizens to trust each other.

As Hobbes argues in ch. 14 of Leviathan, we have to seek to exit the state of nature with its

universal war, and to enter a state of peace (First Law of Nature). In order to do so, we have

to cooperate, and make contracts with each other – including covenants, where the

performances that the parties agree upon do not immediately follow the conclusion of the

contract. Yet in the state of nature, we have to view each other with diffidence, and hence,

cannot trust that others will actually keep the contracts they have entered into. Rather, we

need to establish a third, authoritative party, which controls our performances, and forces us,

if necessary, to comply with our contracts:

If a Covenant be made, wherein neither of the parties performe presently, but trust

one another; in the condition of mere Nature, (which is a condition of Warre of

every man against every man,) upon any reasonable suspition, it is Voyd: But if

there be a common Power set over them both, with right and force sufficient to

compell performance; it is not Voyd. (ch. 14, 96)

Thus, Hobbes argues that we are rationally required to leave the state of nature and cooperate.

But this cooperation requires a form of mutual trust. This trust is possible only if there is a

sanctioning authority, which acts in a way that makes it extremely irrational to infringe the

agreements one has entered.45

44 Cf. Baier, “Trust and Antitrust”, 241, on infant trust. 45 There are other passages in Leviathan which suggest that for Hobbes, trust is impossible even within the

State (cf. ch. 13, 89). But then we could not enter into covenants even there. There may be a terminological

24

It follows that it is the responsibility of the sanctioning power to guarantee our

security – to protect our liberties, our property, and our contractual entitlements. Without the

sanctioning power, we could not even make contracts, we could not assign property, etc.

Corresponding to this responsibility is a coordinate authority to enforce the rights and duties

of the partners. Hence, Hobbes’ sanctioning power possesses one element of State authority,

legitimate enforceability. The further elements of the characterization of the State that we

have given above follow if some further, plausible assumptions are made: 1. that the

important aspects of our lives are affected by our mutual transactions (and hence, by the

authority assigned to the sanctioning power); 2. that the sanctioning power has authority only

in a certain territory; and 3. that the sanctioning power has authority only over a determinate

group of individuals, namely, those who have actually granted it that authority.

How successful is Hobbes’ argument to the effect that trust requires a protective State?

One important problem with his argument can be brought out by briefly rehearsing Fichte’s

related explanation of State authority in the Foundations of Natural Law, as well as Hegel’s

reaction to it.46 Fichte pursues an approach that is very similar to Hobbes’, but reaches

directly opposed conclusions. He starts by pointing out that free rational beings can coexist as

such only if they decide to bind themselves by a norm that prohibits interferences in each

other’s spheres of freedom (which, for Fichte, are identical with one’s property). In case this

law is infringed by one of its subscribers, the offended partners have the right to deprive the

offender of (some of) his liberties. Yet how can they ever restitute his liberties without being

able to know whether the offender actually does respect the law, and will not immediately

infringe it again? As “no-one can risk giving up his hard-won advantage over the other party

by ignoring his legitimate suspicion and believing in the other’s sincerity” (§8, GA I/3:394),

the “mutual restoration of freedom” is possible only if the involved parties “make it

impossible, physically impossible, for themselves to violate one another further” (ibid.). This

“warranty”, or “security for the future”, requires in its turn an independent bearer of authority

who administers the law:

The two parties were not able simply to lay down their weapons, because neither

was able to trust the other. Therefore, they would have to place the weapons, i.e.

their entire power, into the hands of a third party they both trust. They would have

to commission this third party to repel whoever among them would violate the

tension here on Hobbes’ part; I will take his usage of “trust” in the passage about covenants quoted in the main text as authoritative.

46 For further problems with Hobbes’ views on trust, see Martin Hollis, Trust Within Reason, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998, 31-37.

25

other. The third party would have to be capable of doing this, and therefore would

have to have superior power. Thus this third party would exercise the right of

coercion on behalf of both of them. (§8, GA I/3:396)

Like Hobbes, Fichte goes on to argue that this third party needs to be buttressed by a system

of control and sanctions such that every infringement of a law is immediately detected and

punished, and it is effectively irrational to offend the law. Fichte describes such a system of

coercive law as “an arrangement […] that would operate with mechanical necessity to

guarantee that any action contrary to right would result in the opposite of its intended end”,

and thereby would “necessitate the will to will only what is rightful” (§14, GA I/3:427).

But unlike Hobbes, Fichte thinks that trust is not possible within such a “mechanical”

State. It is in principle possible, Fichte points out, that individuals agree upon a law that

assigns spheres of liberty merely on the basis of “loyalty and trust”. Yet as soon as an

infringement of these liberties takes place, loyalty and trust necessarily vanish, and “[o]nce

loyalty and trust have been lost, they cannot be re-established” (§14, GA I/3:425). Hence, the

mechanical system of coercive law is not supposed to restore the trust that has gone lost, but

to replace it. And as Fichte further develops the resulting view of the State, he makes it clear

that we actually cannot even trust the State and its institutions: as he points out, the State “is

constructed on the premise of universal mistrust. It is not even itself trusted, nor is it to be

trusted” (§19 H, GA I/4:47). Rather, it takes a control power, the “ephorate”, to monitor the

working of the government (including the judiciary system) and, if necessary, to dissolve it.

Fichte’s view that mistrust is the fundamental condition of political life – not only the

condition that forces us to establish a State (as in Hobbes’ theory), but also the normal

condition within the State –, leads Hegel to reject approaches like Fichte’s altogether. For as I

have already briefly mentioned, Hegel himself advances a view of the State that does grant

trust a central role. In the critique of Fichte’s political philosophy that Hegel offers in his

Natural Law essay, he locates the central shortcoming of Fichte’s theory precisely in the

claim that the State is based on mistrust, and incapable of restoring trust (TW 2:471ff.). And

in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel offers the following critical characterization

that is apparently meant to capture, among other things (more on this later), Fichte’s account

of the State:

In general, to take the negative as starting-point and to make malevolence and

distrust of malevolence the primary factor, and then, on this assumption, to devise

ingenious levees whose efficiency depends merely on corresponding counter-

26

levees is, as far as thought is concerned, characteristic of the negative

understanding […]. (EPR §272 Rem.)

Note that in his rejection of Fichte’s political philosophy, Hegel relies on Fichte’s own claim

that a State whose function it is to maximize the security of its citizens leaves no room for

trust (neither between citizens, nor between citizens and the State).

Who is right then – Hobbes, who thinks that the State can enable trust by maximizing

security, or Fichte and Hegel, who both think that this function of the State is incompatible

with trust (although they draw opposite conclusions from this)? This depends, once more, on

how precisely the notion of trust is understood. For a distinction can be made between two

ways of understanding ordinary trust, depending on whether trust is seen as compatible with

attempts to exclude any risk or not. On one reading of ordinary trust – which we may call

“risk-averse ordinary trust” –, trust is compatible with such attempts, and may even require

them. Think of a businessman who enters into a potentially risky deal because he trusts the

other party – but only because the deal has been submitted to the control of a third party who

would detect and sanction any misbehavior. But in another, narrower sense – call it “risk-

affine ordinary trust” –, trust partly consists in a readiness to accept some risks, and therefore

precisely excludes a minimization of risk. On that reading, we use means to minimize risk –

such as control and sanctions – only where we do not trust other persons.47

It bears emphasis that both risk-affine and risk-averse trust require treating appropriate

instances of the above scheme (P) as true. Therefore, the trustor expects in both cases that the

trustee will act in a way that doesn’t offend the trustor’s interests; this expectation as such is

not weakened or abandoned in risk-affine trust. Nevertheless, a distinction can be made

regarding the way in which the notion of goodwill in (P) is understood in each case, and this

distinction is apt to explain the difference between risk-affine and risk-averse trust. First,

goodwill can be understood in the very weak sense that the trustee will de facto not offend the

trustor’s liberties and rights – for instance, because this would be highly dangerous for him. In

this case, it may be reasonable for the trustor to use mechanisms of control and sanction to

make sure that the trustee will really act in the expected way. This situation corresponds to the

risk-averse reading of trust. But second, one can give a more robust meaning to goodwill by

assuming that A acts in goodwill towards B only if A is disposed to refrain from offending

B’s rights and legitimate demands even where doing so would be actually profitable for A. In

that case, if B trusts A, he has to ascribe such a disposition to A. But then it makes no sense

for B to spend resources for minimizing his risk, and for making sure that A will really refrain 47 Pace Hobbes, the current literature often restricts the notion of trust to this risk-affine sense; e.g., Baier,

“Trust and Antitrust”, 235.

27

from offending B’s rights. For the point of a mechanism of control and sanctions would be to

make any offence unprofitable for A. If B finds it necessary to minimize the risk in this way,

this shows that he actually does not trust A in the relevant sense. So the stronger

understanding of goodwill leads to the risk-affine reading of ordinary trust.

Hobbes clearly relies on a view of trust as risk-averse. He therefore can claim that the

State is supposed to enable trust by minimizing the risk that covenants among the State’s

citizens are not kept. In that case, the citizens will ascribe to each other goodwill in the weak

sense (they think that no one will act against a covenant because this would be clearly a

foolish thing to do). By contrast, both Fichte and Hegel think that the mechanical, protective

State leaves no room for trust because they understand trust in the risk-affine sense, and

goodwill in the stronger sense of a disposition to refrain from offending someone else’s rights

even where it would actually be profitable to do so.

From what we have already said, it is clear that the unspecific ordinary trust which,

according to the argument in the previous section, is a necessary presupposition for

hermeneutic trust in Brandom’s sense, is a form of risk-affine trust. For the ascriptions of

goodwill involved in unspecific ordinary trust were supposed to make sure that the

recognitive relations of hermeneutic trust correspond to the meta-attitude of Edelmut, as

opposed to Niederträchtigkeit. In its cynical variant, Niederträchtigkeit holds that all human

agency is egoistic; Edelmut denies this, and operates on the presumption of non-egoistic

agency. But an agent who acts not merely egoistically has to act in goodwill towards others in

the stronger of the two senses distinguished above. For otherwise, the fact that someone de

facto does not violate the interests of others could be merely due to the fact that in the context

of the “mechanical” State, this is in egoistic terms the most useful behavior for him.

Therefore, Hobbes’ argument in its original form cannot be used to establish a need

for a State as a precondition for a practice of unspecific ordinary trust (and therefore also of

hermeneutic trust). Nevertheless, I believe that there is a modified version of this argument

which is compatible both with Hegel’s views on trust and political institutions, and with

Brandomian hermeneutic trust and its implications. The problem with the Hobbesian/Fichtean

approach to the State as protective power was that on this account, the State has to bring the

security of individuals and their rights to an absolute maximum. In the case of Fichte’s

“mechanical” State, it becomes particularly clear what practical consequences this has. For

Fichte, it is of the outmost importance that every violation of a norm – even the least

significant one – be noticed by the police, brought to court and punished (e.g., GA I/4:91).

Hence, the State is required to know everything about my whereabouts and my deeds (e.g.,

28

GA I/4:92) (with exception of those that take place in my own house; but even in that case,

the State at least needs to know that I am at home: GA I/4:49, 88), and legal prosecution must

be swift and absolutely reliable (e.g., GA I/3:445). Fichte’s mechanical State would be a

surveillance State that leaves no room for trust in the risk-affine sense.

But we should not conclude from this that trust does not have political preconditions.

Rather, even if a risk-affine view of trust as Fichte’s and Hegel’s is adopted, a basic

Hobbesian point still applies: it is extremely unlikely that a stable practice of trust could arise

in a situation that is totally devoid of an enforceable normative authority which protects

individual rights. Note that the claim here is not that without protection by political

institutions, adopting an attitude of unspecific ordinary trust would be always less useful for

agents than distrusting others, or that adopting such an unprotected attitude of trust is not

optimal from a decision-theoretical viewpoint.48 Rather, adopting an unrestricted attitude of

unspecific ordinary trust (with a bound variable in the position of the trustee that ranges over

all human beings whom one can in principle interact with) under conditions of anarchy would

mean to make one’s life and possessions extremely vulnerable to attacks by others. It would

therefore amount to a policy through which an agent systematically and knowingly puts at

risk the physical preconditions of his own thought and agency.49 If concept-use as such would

imply a commitment to a policy that threatens to undermine the physical possibility of

concept-use, a coherent form of concept-use that lives up to its own implicit commitments –

such as post-modern Edelmut – would be possible only incidentally and ephemerally (namely

as long as no one exploits the vulnerability that comes with unprotected trust).50 A stable form

of such coherent concept-use – a stable practice of post-modern Edelmut – would then be

impossible.

A stable practice of trust therefore requires at least a robust basic protection. Such a

basic protection, however, is not itself incompatible with trust, even in the risk-affine sense.

48 Nor does this version of the Hobbesian point assume that trust can only be instrumentally justified, as

Hobbes himself does. (It is therefore compatible with Hollis’ criticism of instrumental views of trust in Trust Within Reason.) Rather, a default attitude of trust is justified (and even made obligatory), on the Brandomian account, by the fact that commitment to such trust is implicit in each concept-use.

49 This point borrows, of course, from Kant’s argument against the moral permissibility of suicide in part II of Groundwork.

50 It is true that this step in the argument rests on the anthropological assumption that human beings under conditions of anarchy are sufficiently likely to take advantage of the weakness of others. This assumption is a commonplace in modern political philosophy, and I do not think anyone will seriously doubt it. (Notice that this assumption is not itself a form of cynicism: it does not entail that all actions are egoistic.) However, one might object that this empirical premise goes substantially beyond Brandom’s (or Hegel’s) semantic theory, and that any political consequences that follow if this premise is accepted are not, strictly speaking, political implications of that semantic theory itself. I am happy to grant this, but would insist that since we are dealing here with preconditions for the realization of a particular type of recognitive practice by human beings, reliance on some anthropological assumptions is unavoidable.

29

Rather, it grants a framework in which we can encounter other persons and cooperate with

them without constantly having to fear that they want to kill or rob us. A State can guarantee

this framework without having to maximize individual security by all means. Rather, a

reduced probability of massive attacks on my rights still leaves me with a substantial choice

whether I attempt to eliminate the remaining risks, too – thereby allowing for relations of risk-

averse trust only –, or whether I am ready to accept such risks, relying on the goodwill of the

persons I interact with. As long as there is such a choice, it is possible for individuals to adopt

unspecific ordinary trust in the risk-affine sense as their default attitude towards other

individuals.51

It follows that we can retain a variant of the first step in Hobbes’ argument: a stable

practice of unspecific ordinary trust is possible only if there is a State authority that grants a

basic security. At the same time, it is a lesson to be learned from both Fichte’s and Hegel’s

discussions that if the strong view of goodwill (corresponding to the attitude of Edelmut) and

the risk-affine view of trust are adopted, attempts to maximize individual security will render

trust impossible. The State that is a necessary condition for unspecific ordinary trust (and

hence, hermeneutic trust, too) must occupy a middle position between anarchy (or the state of

nature), on the one hand, and a Fichtean surveillance State, on the other hand.

In the next two sections, I will discuss what concrete consequences in terms of

institutional design the results of this section have, and how these consequences relate to

Hegel’s political philosophy.

5. Trust and institutional design: preliminaries

51 Drawing on empirical research regarding the climate of trust in different societies, Rothstein, “Trust and

Social Capital”, 836 gives a nice description of how such a default attitude within a framework of institutional protection works in actual practice. The passage is worth being quoted at length: “[C]o-operation between people who do not have personalized knowledge about each other’s incentive structure will be more common in a society with a high level of social trust. This does not imply that in a society with a high level of social trust, people will entrust complete strangers with very valuable assets without having some other reassurance against being exploited. Instead, it is more reasonable to think that in such a society, people may buy a used car from someone who does not belong to their ethnic tribe, hire a person to work in the small business who is not from their own extended family, or rent out their house while on a sabbatical to someone who does not belong to the same academic network (or clan). It is also likely that they will enter into many economic exchanges without having to pay for the service of a law firm or have other similar transaction costs. It is true that in many cases such co-operation is backed up by more formal institutions, such as the existence of an impartial ‘rule of law’ system. However, empirical work shows that economic agents in societies with a high degree of mutual and beneficial economic co-operation hardly ever make use of these institutions or even think about using them. Instead, trustful co-operation is generated by informal institutions [...]. Co-operation and honesty can in some societies simply be taken for granted and in the rare occasions when agents behave dishonestly, other means than relying on formal institutions are used. Still, the benevolent informal institutions may have come about because of the existence of trustworthy formal institutions, which implies that the informal institutions exist ‘in the shadow’ of formal ones.”

30

I have argued so far that hermeneutic trust requires unspecific ordinary trust, and that

unspecific ordinary trust can be rational only if there are political institutions which grant a

basic protection of individual rights without, however, maximizing that protection through

total surveillance and norm-enforcement. We have to ask next what consequences this way of

relating the State to the notion of trust has for the concrete institutional outlook of a trust-

enabling State, and how these consequences relate to Hegel’s political philosophy. Before

addressing these questions, we will first have to discuss some preliminary issues that have to

do with the relation between trust in individuals and trust in institutions.

1. Trust among individuals vs. trust in institutions. Hegel, as I have already mentioned,

almost exclusively addresses trust vis-à-vis political institutions, as opposed to trust between

citizens as such. Of course, general trust in fellow citizens does not automatically coincide

with trust in institutions. However, both in Brandom’s and in Hegel’s framework, there is

reason to assume that a stable practice of unspecific ordinary trust among citizens within a

State presupposes unspecific ordinary trust on the part of the citizens towards the political

institutions of the State. Given Brandom’s premises, this point can be argued for as follows. If

our argument so far is sound, stable hermeneutic trust in other natural persons is possible only

if political institutions are granted State authority. But by granting State authority to an

institution, we establish a recognitive relation with that institution, too. It should be expected

that the recognitive relations with institutions that we have to establish in order to be able to

create adequate recognitive relations with other natural persons involve hermeneutic trust as

well. As a matter of principle, artificial persons that are created in the context of States (the

police, a government etc.) are agents to which we can stand in many of the same recognitive

relations in which we stand with natural persons. In particular, they qualify as potential

addressees of Edelmut and trust: just as we can offer rational reconstructions of the agency of

natural persons, and expect them to adopt rational reconstructions of our behavior, we can

also offer rational reconstructions of the agency of State institutions, and expect them to do

likewise (more on this in section 6). Yet if it is accepted that institutions count among the

potential targets of hermeneutic trust, it follows that unspecific ordinary trust in institutions,

too, is needed in order for a stable practice of hermeneutic trust among citizens to be possible.

Within the framework of Hegel’s political philosophy, it is a bit harder to establish a

direct connection between trust among individuals and trust in institutions. However, there is

evidence suggesting that Hegel thinks of trust or distrust vis-à-vis institutions as a

consequence of a general attitude of trust or distrust, which also includes unspecific ordinary

trust with regard to other individuals. I have already quoted before Hegel’s critique of a view

31

that makes “malevolence and distrust of malevolence the primary factor, and then, on this

assumption”, devises “ingenious levees whose efficiency depends merely on corresponding

counter-levees” (EPR §272 Rem.). I have suggested reading this passage as being (at least

partly) a critique of Fichte’s political theory in the Foundations of Natural Law. On this

reading, the passage would refer both to distrust with respect to individuals and to distrust

with respect to institutions: Fichte’s State (in particular, the institutions related to coercive

law) is based on distrust between the individuals, and hence consists of “ingenious levees”

that are supposed to margin the malevolence that individuals ascribe to each other. But as

Fichte points out explicitly, we cannot even trust the political institutions themselves, given

that they are based on distrust. Hence, there have to be control organs like the ephorate, which

are supposed to monitor and, if necessary, to sanction the other political institutions. Hegel

presumably refers to this additional level of distrust (distrust vis-à-vis institutions) when he

talks about the “corresponding counter-levees”.

Thus, Hegel seems to assume that (dis)trust towards other persons and (dis)trust

towards institutions come in a package – that there is a general attitude of (dis)trust, which

involves both (dis)trust towards other individuals in general, and (dis)trust towards political

institutions.52 As a consequence, it is fair to conclude that within Hegel’s (as well as

Brandom’s) framework, the institutional preconditions for trust in institutions are at the same

time institutional preconditions for unspecific ordinary trust in other individuals. – When

discussing in the following institutional conditions for unspecific ordinary trust among

individuals, we therefore can also draw on contexts in which Hegel discusses conditions for

trust in institutions.

2. Asymmetries between trust among individuals and trust in institutions. Even if we

assume, following the implications of Brandom’s and Hegel’s claims, that unspecific ordinary

trust requires trust in institutions, we should still acknowledge that on a plausible view, there

are important asymmetries between trust in institutions, and trust between individuals. We

have so far treated unspecific ordinary trust as a stance that takes unspecific ordinary trust in

other individuals as a default attitude. This presupposes that the doxastic stance which is

involved in trust is justified by default – at least if the required institutional conditions are in

place, and overriding factors (such as an imminent threat by another person) are absent. By

contrast, it is doubtful whether trust in institutions is a matter of justification by default, too.

52 It is also worth noting in this context that at the end of the passage in question, Hegel identifies the approach

which makes “malevolence and distrust of malevolence the primary factor” not only with the “negative understanding” (Fichte), but also with the “viewpoint of the rabble” (“Ansicht des Pöbels”), i.e., the general distrustful attitude of the impoverished class that emerges in a degenerate civil society. (I will say more about the relation between distrust and poverty below.)

32

There seem to be two differences between both cases of trust that suggest such an

epistemological asymmetry. First, political institutions themselves can, at least in principle,

become much more dangerous to citizens than their fellow citizen; for since they rest on State

authority, they effectively have much more power than any individual. Second, it is plausible

to read the propositional content (P) that is involved in trust towards political institutions in a

stronger way than in the case of trust in individuals. From a State that acts in goodwill

towards its citizens, we normally would not only expect that it respects the rights of the

citizens; we would expect that it acts in ways that are apt to actively promote the citizens’

interests. (Alternatively, we could say that it is part of the citizens’ rights that the State

promote their interests.) Both points, if sound, suggest that the stakes for trust in the State are

much higher than in the case of trust in fellow citizens. This difference can be plausibly

thought to have the consequence that trust in political institutions cannot be justified by

default. Rather, it stands in need of a justification of its own.

6. Trust and institutional design: Hegelian perspectives

We can finally ask now what concrete institutional requirements the rational possibility of

unspecific ordinary trust (and, as a consequence, of hermeneutic trust) can be taken to have,

and how these requirements relate to Hegel’s political philosophy. I will discuss the following

four aspects of institutional design. I start by looking at institutional consequences that follow

from the intermediate position between anarchy and total surveillance that a trust-enabling

Hegelian (and Brandomian) State has to occupy – that is, consequences regarding the

protective function of the State (1) and the limited character it needs to have (2). Next, I will

look at a connection between trust, welfare and market regulation that is implicit in Hegel’s

writings (3). Finally, I will address the issue of trust in institutions (4) – first with regard to

Hegel’s notion of the “political disposition”, second with regard to the role of control organs

that monitor the activity of political institutions, and third with regard to the role of rational

reconstructions.

1. Protection. According to the revised Hobbesian argument from section 4, the State

has to guarantee its citizens robust, albeit not maximal, security, in order to enable relations of

mutual trust. In section 2, we have defined political institutions in terms of State authority,

and we have seen that State authority essentially comprises a legitimately enforceable

normative authority. The protective function that the State has to exercise in order to enable

mutual trust between its citizens can be straightforwardly located in this aspect of State

authority. In order for trust between citizens to be rationally possible, the norms that the State

33

is entitled to stipulate and to administer have to include norms that safeguard the physical

integrity, freedom of movement, property, and contractually acquired rights of the State’s

citizens. In addition, the State needs both the entitlement and the actual ability to warrant a

reasonably effective enforcement of these norms. It follows that the State has to include some

version of the classical State powers – the legislative power which stipulates the relevant

norms, the judiciary power which administers them, and the executive power which enforces

them.

All these points have equivalents in Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right, too.

The norms in question are more or less those which in Hegel’s philosophy of right make up

the sphere of “abstract right”. It is true that Hegel does not view the three classical powers as

independent State powers; rather, he only treats the executive as a branch of constitution in its

own right. Nevertheless, the legislative stipulation and the judiciary administration of the

norms in question do have a firm, albeit subordinate, place in his theory of the State (EPR

§§209ff. with §287; §§298ff.). Moreover, Hegel also illustrates his understanding of the

“political disposition” of trust in terms of the security that we take for granted within the

State, thereby suggesting a close connection between protection and trust: “It does not occur

to someone who walks the streets in safety at night that this might be otherwise, for this habit

of [living in] safety has become second nature, and we scarcely stop to think that it is solely

the effect of particular institutions” (EPR §258 Add.).

2. Limitation. It is less obvious how the limited character of State control and

regulation that is needed in order to keep the protective State from turning into a Fichtean

police State can be institutionally implemented, and how such an implementation can be made

out in Hegel’s theory of the State. One way of interpreting this limitation is in terms of

institutionalized civil rights, such as the right to privacy. The middle path between anarchy

and total surveillance that is required for trust can then be thought of as an institutionalized

balance between the competing claims of security and privacy (as well as other civil rights).

While Hegel himself does not explicitly address the significance of such institutionalized

rights, I think that no one will deny nowadays that if we want to have a State that exercises a

protective function without turning into a surveillance State, it will be better to have

institutionalized civil rights including a robust right to privacy.

Whereas he is silent about this way of limiting State control, Hegel offers some original

elements for a further pertinent strategy that is highly relevant to our purpose. The points that

I have in mind show up clearest in Hegel’s sketches for a treatise on the German Constitution

(written between 1799 and 1802) that was supposed to analyze the legal and political situation

34

of the then still-existing Holy Roman Empire, and to propose modifications to its constitution.

In a manuscript entitled “The Concept of the State”, Hegel fiercely attacks so-called

“mechanistic” views of the State. This label had been explicitly used by Fichte to characterize

his own account of the State – recall, an account that sees the State as “an arrangement […]

that would operate with mechanical necessity to guarantee that any action contrary to right

would result in the opposite of its intended end”, and that thereby would “necessitate the will

to will only what is rightful” (Foundations of Natural Law §14, GA I/3:427). In the

manuscript, Hegel argues that such a State displays a “pedantic craving to determine every

detail”, an “illiberal jealousy of all direction and administration by an Estate, corporation, etc.,

of its own affairs”, and a “pusillanimous carping at all independent activity on the part of the

citizens – even if its significance is purely general and of no relevance to the political

authority” (TW 1:481). Hegel criticizes the resulting political order on two grounds.53 First,

he claims that it is too illiberal. Instead of the over-regulated mechanistic State, he pleas for a

decentralized54 State in which

the center, as the political authority and government, must leave to the freedom of

the citizens whatever is not essential to its own role of organizing and maintaining

authority, and hence to its external and internal security, and that nothing should

be so sacred to it as the approval and protection of the citizens’ free activity in

such matters, regardless of utility; for this freedom is inherently sacred. (TW

1:482)

In the context of the “German Constitution” manuscripts, this amounts, as a matter of fact, to

an extremely minimalistic State. Hegel had claimed earlier in the same manuscript that the

purpose for which a mass of people unites itself into a State is the “common defense of the

totality of its property” (TW 1:472).55 Given that purpose, people have to “form a common

military force and political authority” in order to constitute a State (TW 1:473). But Hegel

points out that this leaves open a great many options for what such a State can look like; he

53 Further problems for a mechanistic State are discussed out in a related context by Philip Pettit, The Common

Mind: An Essay on Psychology, Society, and Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996, 325f. (Thanks to Daniel James for pointing me to this text.)

54 Paul Franco, Hegel’s Philosophy of Freedom, New Haven / London: Yale University Press, 1999, 50 compares Hegel’s position in the “German Constitution” writings with Tocqueville’s notion of “administrative decentralization”. But Tocqueville opposes this form of decentralization to “governmental decentralization”; and Hegel in the manuscript in question clearly seems to plea for a high degree of governmental decentralization, too. By contrast, the aspects of decentralization in his later political philosophy (see below) might indeed be seen as mainly administrative in nature.

55 Franco, Hegel’s Philosophy of Freedom, 49 reads Hegel here as talking about the property of the State, but this is not warranted by the German text.

35

even admits that civil law and its judiciary administration could be entirely left over to the

regional principalities and city States within the Empire.

Hegel’s second objection to the mechanistic State in the manuscript in question is that it

lacks efficiency. Partly, this is a matter of administrative costs which the decentralized,

minimal State does not incur, and of the better functioning of State administration that can be

expected if the tasks of that administration are restricted. But the higher efficiency of the non-

mechanistic State is also a matter of trust, Hegel believes. As he points out: “The mechanistic

hierarchy, highly ingenious and dedicated to noble ends, extends no trust whatsoever towards

its citizens, and therefore cannot expect any from them in return” (TW 1:483). And Hegel

thinks that this has massive consequences for the efficiency of the State:

It makes an infinite difference whether the political authority is organized in such

a way that everything on which it can rely is in its own hands (although for this

very reason it cannot rely on anything else), or whether, apart from what is in its

own hands, it can also rely on the free allegiance, self-confidence, and individual

enterprise of the people – on an all-powerful, indomitable spirit which the

hierarchical State has expelled and which lives only where the supreme political

authority leaves as much as possible in the care of the citizens themselves. (TW

1:484)

As an alternative to Hobbes’ and Fichte’s mechanistic State, Hegel seems to advocate here a

subsidiarity-oriented view of the State – a view on which tasks in a society should be carried

out by the smallest entity (individual, group, organization, institution) that is capable of doing

so.

Now it is clear that there are enormous differences between Hegel’s position in the

“German Constitution” manuscripts and the one presented 20 years later in the Elements of

the Philosophy of Right. But I think that Hegel’s remarks on trust and subsidiarity in that

manuscript are linked to an important continuity between Hegel’s early and his mature

position. This continuity has to do with Hegel’s view of the State as an organism. The

“organicist” dimension of Hegel’s political philosophy has been frequently criticized – not

least because it is often thought to give rise to a totalitarian conception of the State. But the

alternative to the mechanistic State that Hegel depicts in the “German Constitution”

manuscript is quite the contrary of a totalitarian state. It is true that Hegel in that manuscript

does not explicitly talk about the State as an organism. But a slightly later discussion in the

Jena Philosophy of Spirit helps to see the connection. In a section that contrasts modern

36

ethical life with its forerunner in the ancient polis, Hegel characterizes modern ethical life in

the following terms:

Just as free as each individual is in his knowing, in his outlook (as varied as it is)

– so [likewise] free are the forces, the individual aspects of the totality, [its]

abstract elements, labor, production, the legal climate, administration, the

military; each develops itself entirely according to its one-sided principle. The

organic whole has many viscera which develop in their abstractness. Not every

individual is a manufacturer, peasant, manual laborer, soldier, judge, etc.; rather,

this is divided, each individual belongs to an abstraction, and he is a totality for

himself in his thinking. (252)

In this passage, Hegel presumably calls the differentiated structure of modern ethical life

“organic” because in a functioning organism, the different organs, while held together by

some unity, need to be fully developed in their functional diversity. Moreover, he seems to

assume that most of these different organs are not themselves State institutions, but rather

parts of civil society. As becomes clear from other passages (e.g., Enc. §198), these non-

political organs of civil society have a crucial mediating function between individual citizens

and the political institutions of the State. Hence, an organic State has to leave enough space

for its non-political organs to fully develop, to create their own administrative structures, and

to occupy their intermediary role between political institutions and individual citizens.

In that sense, Hegel’s minimal State in the “German Constitution” manuscript is

organic, too. For as the before-quoted passage on subsidiarity shows, Hegel thinks that a well-

functioning State has to make room for autonomous, developed non-State organizations. And

although Hegel changes his mind – already in the Jena Philosophy of Spirit – about the

institutional structure and competences of a rational State and its relation to civil society, his

later position can still be read as advocating a State that is organic also in the sense that there

are intermediary “organs” which mediate between the political institutions in the narrower

sense, on the one hand, and the individual citizens, on the other hand, and have a substantial

autonomy which, in its turn, requires some degree of decentralization.56 In Hegel’s mature

political theory, this intermediary position is mainly occupied by the estates and the

corporations. But we may grant that nowadays, Hegel’s estates and corporations have been

replaced by other social groupings and organizations, such as trade unions and NGOs, while

still retaining the point that decentralization and subsidiarity can contribute to creating a

56 Cf. Robert Pippin’s remarks on the limited character of Hegel’s State in his Hegel’s Practical Philosophy.

Rational Agency as Ethical Life, Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 262.

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climate of trust for which there is no place in Hobbes’ and Fichte’s mechanistic States of total

control.57

Before we proceed further, two points regarding this conclusion bear emphasis. First,

it is one thing to accept the general point that trust requires some decentralization and

limitation of State power, and quite another thing to adopt a precise account of which tasks

should be left over to non-State organizations – be it the account Hegel gives in the Elements

of the Philosophy of Right, or any other such account. For our present purpose, we have to

leave open the question what precise account of this latter issue should be given. Second, our

discussion does not entail that the autonomous development of intermediary organs by itself

necessarily raises the degree of trust in a society. Decentralization may be a necessary, but not

sufficient condition for a climate of trust.58 In particular, it seems plausible that intermediary

organs can be expected to make a positive contribution to trust only if some further conditions

are fulfilled, such as a sufficiently high degree of social equality (see the next subsection). For

in a strongly unequal society, organizations that represent different social groups are likely to

be in harsh competition with each other, and to work as lobbies that pursue highly

particularistic goals. This will weaken trust between members of the different groups,59 rather

than creating the sense of civic engagement that Hegel opposes to the mechanistic State.

3. Welfare and market. I have quoted earlier a passage in which Hegel discusses the

attitude that makes “malevolence and distrust of malevolence the primary factor” – a general

attitude of distrust both against political institutions, and against other individuals. As the

passage continues, Hegel not only ascribes this attitude to the “negative understanding”

(presumably referring to Fichte); he also identifies it with what he calls the “viewpoint of the

rabble” (Ansicht des Pöbels) (EPR §272 Rem.). The “rabble” is the impoverished proletariat

that emerges if civil society is abandoned to its own dynamics. Hegel does not further justify

this connection between a general attitude of distrust and poverty. But once again, he makes

an assumption here about the social psychology of trust that receives support from empirical

57 As Daniel James has suggested to me, there is a further way in which intermediary organs like Hegel’s

corporations can, in addition to their role of limiting State control, contribute to the promotion of collective trust: they provide individuals with a form of social prestige (Hegel’s “Standesehre”). The competition for such prestige can create a mechanism of decentralized control, in which behavior that undermines trust and trustworthiness (e.g., by breaking unwritten rules of “professional” behavior) is sanctioned in informal and unintentional ways (cf. Pettit, The Common Mind, 327-338).

58 On an influential view in social science, a high degree of participation in voluntary associations is indeed a sufficient factor for a high level of general trust within a society (cf. the seminal study Robert Putnam, Making Democracy Work. Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, Princeton University Press: Princeton, N.J., 1993). However, this view has been challenged by more recent empirical work (cf., with further literature, Bo Rothstein / Dietlind Stolle, “The State and Social Capital: An Institutionalized Theory of Generalized Trust”, Comparative Politics 40 (2008), 441-459, here: 442).

59 Cf. Stephen Knack / Philip Keefer, “Does Social Capital Have an Economic Payoff? A Cross-Country Investigation”, The Quarterly Journal of Economics 112 (1997), 1251-1288, here: 1278.

38

research. For as recent empirical work has shown, social equality is an important correlate of

a climate of trust, in which a general attitude of mutual trust between individual citizens

prevails.60

As Hegel believes that pauperism is a necessary result of the forces of an unregulated

market economy (EPR §§243f.), he ascribes the State (more precisely, the police: EPR §§236,

241f.) the task of reducing unemployment and poverty through market regulation and welfare

(which does not exclude private forms of welfare: EPR §242). It seems clear that Hegel

(again, unlike Fichte) does not want this to lead to a form of socialism. Rather, we should

assume that the State has to find a balance between this task, on the one hand, and the

principles of subsidiarity and decentralization that we have addressed above, on the other

hand. In concrete political life, such a balance can take different forms (with different

amounts of State welfare, different degrees of market regulation, etc.). What matters for our

purpose is only that there are two preconditions for unspecific ordinary trust among

individuals that pull in different directions – social equality as a result of welfare and market

regulation, on the one hand, and civic engagement as made possible by decentralization and

subsidiarity, on the other hand. In order to enable trust among citizens, the State needs to

include political institutions that capture both requirements, and involve a process of political

decision-making which is apt to adjust the balance between both demands to the actual social

and economic circumstances at a given point of time. – In the last part of this section, I will

turn to claims that specifically address the preconditions for trust in political institutions; as

we have seen in section 5 above, such claims should also be taken to have consequences for

trust in individuals.

4. Trust in institutions. a. Hegel on the “political disposition”. A State that fulfills the

conditions discussed so far at the same time meets some of the requirements that it takes,

according to Hegel, for the State to be itself trustworthy. For we have seen above that Hegel

identifies the “political disposition” – the “subjective side” of ethical life – with trust in the

State, understood as “the consciousness that my substantial and particular interest is preserved

and contained in the interest and end of an other”, i.e., the State. It follows that we can

rationally trust the State only if we are entitled to assume that it will respect and promote both

our “particular” and our “substantial” interest. It is plausible to read the term “particular

interest” as including at least the following: (a) the before-mentioned interest to have one’s

60 E.g., Alberto Alesina / Eliana La Ferrara, “Who Trusts Others?”, in Journal of Public Economics 85, 207-34;

Knack/Keefer, “Does Social Capital Have an Economic Payoff?”, 1282; Jan Delhey / Kenneth Newton, “Social Trust: Global Pattern or Nordic Exceptionalism?”, WZB Discussion Paper, No. SP I 2004-202, online: < http://hdl.handle.net/10419/44134>, accessed 15/6/2014.

39

physical intactness, freedom of action, property, and contractually acquired rights protected;

and (b) the interest to be in an economic position that not only enables one to maintain one’s

own (and perhaps one’s family’s) subsistence, but also to satisfy to some reasonable extent

one’s desires for commodities and social recognition (cf. EPR §§190-192). Both points are

covered by our above argument: we can trust the State, and hence trust each other, only if the

State exerts a protective function, and guarantees the conditions under which everyone can

reach or maintain a reasonable economic position.

The term “substantial interest”, by contrast, is less clear. It is most plausibly read as

the interest to be a member in a rational State.61 For as is well known, Hegel often refers to

the rational State as “substance” that is rational and valuable in itself, and that we therefore –

at least implicitly – want to take part in. If this is what Hegel means by “substantial interest”,

this part of his account of the political disposition does not add a specific requirement for the

trustworthiness of the State. Rather, it boils down to the claim that only the Hegelian state can

be trusted (because other State forms will not count as adequately realizing the intrinsically

rational and valuable “substance”). In the context of our inquiry, there is no need to accept

this claim.

However, we can identify two further conditions for the trustworthiness of a State on

the basis of what we have said so far. Given the reasoning in section 5, subsection 2 above,

these conditions will also constitute institutional presuppositions for the possibility of

unspecific ordinary trust among individuals.

4b. Abuse of power. First, let us come back once more to the passage in §272 Rem. where

Hegel criticizes the attitude of distrust. The context of this passage is a critical discussion of

the doctrine of the separation of powers, and in particular the idea of checks and balances

between the powers. As a consequence, Hegel in this part of his discussion not only dismisses

mechanistic accounts of the State such as Fichte’s, he also rejects the view that the powers of

the State should control and balance each other. As he writes about the model of checks and

balances:

In this view, the reaction of each power to the others is one of hostility and fear, as

if to an evil, and their determination is such that they oppose one another and

produce, by means of this counterpoise, a general equilibrium rather than a living

unity. (EPR §272 Rem.)

Hegel’s maneuver is by now familiar: he accuses the checks and balances model of separation

of powers to be motivated by a universal attitude of distrust; Hegel’s alternative is to replace 61 Cf. Ludwig Siep, “Was heißt: ‘Aufhebung der Moralität in Sittlichkeit’ in Hegels Rechtsphilosophie?”, in:

id., Praktische Philosophie im Deutschen Idealismus, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1992, 217-239, here: 234.

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this attitude with one of trust, and to advocate an organic State that refrains from excessive

regulation and control.

But while I have argued that this line of reasoning is sound with regard to the question

how political institutions can enable trust among individuals, the way Hegel applies it to the

trustworthiness of institutions seems clearly mistaken. One need not be overly pessimistic to

expect that if the agency of political institutions is not monitored and, if necessary, corrected

by control organs, corruption and abuse of power are highly likely to take place.62 The

consequence will not only be a waste and misuse of taxpayers’ money, it will also lead to

unfair and arbitrary treatment of individual citizens (e.g., unfair trials, arbitrary violence by

police forces, etc.). A State which is likely to bring about and tolerate such phenomena is

precisely a State that no one should trust. As a consequence, we should resist Hegel’s critique

of the checks and balances model, and conclude that trust in political institutions can be

warranted only if the agency of these institutions is regulated, monitored, and, if necessary,

disciplined, by reliable control organs.63 This does not mean that trust in political institutions

is structurally entirely different from trust in individuals. If trust in individuals requires

protection by political institutions, it is only reasonable to assume that trust in political

institutions requires some form of institutionalized protection against abuses of this trust, too.

It might be the case that the degree of inter-institutional control that is required for trust in

institutions is relatively high, if compared to the limited degree of control that is required (as I

have argued) for trust in individuals. But if there is an asymmetry here, it presumably can be

explained in terms of the differences between trust in individuals and trust in political

institutions that we have observed in section 5, subsection 2 above.

While this result contradicts Hegel’s “official” position regarding control organs, it

may well be argued that Hegel in some specific contexts of his political philosophy is

sensitive to issues of power abuse. Thus, in the contemporary debate about jury trials, he

agrees with liberals like Benjamin Constant that all court trials should involve juries whose

members are agreed upon by the legal parties (EPR §228 Rem.): as Hegel points out, this is

required in order to ensure that the parties trust the authority who makes the legal decision

(EPR §228). It is fair to read him here as attempting to rule out unfair and arbitrary trials, and

hence, as feeling at least some need for control mechanisms with regard to political

62 Since the agency of State institutions is realized in the behavior of individuals who represent them, the

question arises whether trust in individuals, insofar as they represent State institutions, is bound to stricter preconditions than trust in individuals in general. We can leave this question open, as nothing important for our present purposes depends on it.

63 Cf. Knack/Keefer, “Does Social Capital Have an Economic Payoff?”, 1279. – Similarly, one might argue that also non-political institutions whose agency greatly affects the general climate of (dis)trust in a society, such as banks, should be subject to strict institutionalized control.

41

institutions. A similar case can be made with regard to the publicity that Hegel demands from

the proceedings of the estates (EPR §314): the “public opinion” (EPR §316) whose role he

emphasizes in this context can be plausibly seen as requiring transparency of political

institutions in general, and a public discourse (involving a free press64) that critically assesses

the working of the institutions. Hence, the claim that a State which deserves trust (and makes

trust among its citizens possible) has to involve control mechanisms that monitor and

discipline the agency of political institutions is, after all, not as alien to Hegel’s political

thought as his dismissal of checks and balances in EPR §272 Rem. would suggest.

4c. Rational reconstructions. Finally, we can connect the issue of trust in political

institutions to Brandom’s account of hermeneutic trust, and the role that rational

reconstructions play in it. I have pointed out above that there seems to be an epistemological

asymmetry between trust in individuals and trust in institutions – the first can be justified by

default, the second needs a justification for each particular case. If we now ask how a

justification for trust in a political institution could look like, Brandom’s account of

hermeneutic trust and rational reconstructions provides a plausible answer.65 Trust in the State

can be justified if a rational reconstruction of past events in the genesis and activity of

political institutions is available. Such rational reconstructions will usually include, first, a

recollection of how the State I live in has come into existence, and has made progress over

time. “Aetiological” myths, and their successors in modern culture (just think of the American

“founding fathers”), play precisely such a role. A “positive” story about the origins of the

State is usually meant to show that the ruling State authority is legitimate. If such a narrative

is available and accepted, it will contribute to justifying the expectation that at least some

types of infringements against the rights and interests of individuals will not take place –

infringements related to tyranny, abuse of power, arbitrariness etc. (Thus, it would usually not

be wise for individual citizens to regard a regime which has taken over power in a coup d’État

with trust – even if the regime is not known to have infringed any individual rights while

being at power.) A similar role can be played by reconstructions that are less optimistic about

the origins of a State, but ascribe that State a strong self-correcting ability that is responsible

for rational progress in the course of history. Second, the rational reconstructions in question

have to capture a sense that citizens have a positive experience with the State they live in, and

64 That covering of political processes in the mass media can promote trust is corroborated by empirical

research: see Amisha Patel, “The Mass Media at Work as a Guardian of Trust”, in: Proceedings Communication at Work: 2005 Autralia and New Zealand Communication Association Conference, online at http://www.anzca.net/component/docman/doc_download/253--the-mass-media-at-work-as-a-guardian-of-trust.html, accessed 15/6/2014.

65 For a fuller account of this point, see my Im Reich der Freiheit, 443-446.

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have found their rights – as well as those of their fellow citizens66 – respected in the past. This

will contribute to justifying the expectation that the State will promote the “particular”

interests of individuals. – Of course, in order for trust in political institutions to be justified,

the rational reconstructions in question need to be themselves warranted and historically

accurate.67

7. Conclusion

I conclude with two remarks. First, it might be objected against my discussion in the last

section that I have made a mistake which Hegel warns us against when he writes:

If the State is confused with civil society and its determination is equated with the

security and protection of property and personal freedom, the interest of

individuals as such becomes the ultimate end for which they are united. – But the

relationship of the State to the individual is of quite a different kind. Since the

State is objective spirit, it is only through being a member of the State that the

individual himself has objectivity, truth, and ethical life. Union as such is itself

the true content and end, and the destiny of individuals is to lead a universal life;

their further particular satisfaction, activity, and mode of conduct have this

substantial and universally valid basis as their point of departure and result. (EPR

§258 Rem.).

I think that our above discussion is compatible with the position that Hegel expresses in this

and similar passages because we have not identified the trust-enabling functions of political

institutions with the purpose of the State. It may true both that we need political institutions in

order to be able to trust each other, and that the actual reason why we live together in a State

is that membership in a rational State is of intrinsic value for us. We can regard something as

an end in itself and still use it also as a means.

Second, it deserves emphasis that the institutional preconditions for mutual trust which

we have discussed do not entail any specific form of government. Some of those institutional

preconditions – in particular, the need for decentralization, for control organs, and for the

availability of accurate rational reconstructions of the past – rule out degenerate political

66 Even though an individual or group finds its own interests promoted by the State, they cannot rationally trust

the State if they are aware that there are other groups which are regularly mistreated. 67 A case where this condition is not fulfilled is the propaganda of regimes which try to create undeserved trust

on the part of citizens by propagating invented or falsified recollections that make their authority appear legitimate. – This aspect of trust is, once again, in accordance with empirical findings showing that trust presupposes processes of trust-building (e.g., Robert C. Salomon / Fernando Flores, Building Trust: In Business, Politics, Relationships, and Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). The rational reconstructions in question might precisely capture and recollect such processes.

43

systems such as tyranny and totalitarianism (remember Fichte’s police state and the regime

that has taken over power in a coup d’État). But the institutional features that we have

discussed still leave open whether a State should be a monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy, to

what extent legitimate State authority requires a form of elective representation, etc. For one

thing, this result should come as a relief, as it follows that we can adopt Hegelian insights into

the connections between trust and institutional design without having to accept his

endorsement of monarchy, the limits he puts on elective representation, etc.

At the same time, this result may be surprising, for it could seem that Brandom’s idea

of reciprocal relations of recognition quite directly leads to some democratic form of

government. But I think that such a connection should be viewed skeptically. For in principle,

a citizen’s acknowledgement of State authority can be balanced by State responsibilities even

though the citizen has no, or no substantial, possibility of political representation. To fulfill

this requirement of a balance between ascriptions of authorities and responsibilities, it would

be enough that the State sufficiently protects and promotes the citizens’ interests in terms of

protection of liberties, welfare, etc. The harmony between the needs of individuals and State

policies that this requires could be in principle due to wise decisions by a trustworthy

monarch or group of aristocrats.68

In saying this, I am of course not suggesting that such forms of government would be

just or rational. The point is only that neither the idea that stable relations of recognition have

to be reciprocal nor any further element of Brandom’s theory of recognition really seems to

entail that an adequate and stable recognitive practice requires democratic institutions. Rather,

in order to argue for such a conclusion, one would need background premises that go beyond

the issues of reciprocal recognition and trust. But I take it that if the problem of the

institutional preconditions for reciprocal recognition and trust turns out to stand orthogonal to

such traditional issues in political philosophy as political representation and forms of

government, this is an interesting result in its own right.69

68 Empirical research does suggest a positive relation between democracy and trust (Delhey/Newton, “Social

Trust”, 7, with further literature). However, most features of democratic States that seem to be responsible for this relation (such as the protection of civil rights and the division of powers) are in principle compatible with other forms of government, too.

69 In preparing this article, I have greatly benefitted from discussions and correspondence with Erasmus Mayr, Daniel James, and Gilles Bouche, as well as from the audience at the Berlin conference on A Spirit of Trust.