In the analysis of trust and government, we may focus on two quite distinct causal issues: citizen trust in other citizens as a result, in part, of governmental institutions and citizen trust in government itself. The former is a variant of the central thesis of Thomas Hobbes. We need government in order to maintain the order that enables us to invest effort in our own well-being and to deal with others in the expectation that we will not be violated. Almost no one other than anarchists disagrees with this view, although some writers have supposed that large government is disruptive of relations between citizens. The American Anti-Federalists and such anti-urban thinkers as Ibn Khaldun (Gellner 1988) therefore opposed large government or urbanization.

The second issue – that citizens might specifically trust government – is suggested in a passage by John Locke. Locke (1988: 381) wrote that society turns power over to its governors, “whom society hath set over it self, with this express or tacit Trust, That it shall be imployed for their good, and the preservation of their Property.” Niklas Luhmann (1979: 54) says that this “old theme of political trust, which played a large role, especially in the period after the end of the religious wars, has virtually disappeared from contemporary political theory.” If it had disappeared, it has come back in force, at least in consideration of the United States and other advanced democratic societies. Now, the supposition that citizens could trust government lies behind a large contemporary literature.