Modernity

‘We’ are inhabitants of the modern world, involving vastly complex and complexly interrelated societies, which achieve an immense amount through impersonal relations. In particular, we do a great deal by relying on egoistic micro-motivations, and it is a remarkable achievement of the modern world to have brought this about. Indeed, it is obvious beyond a certain level of social size and complexity that we must rely a lot on such motivations, because of the kinds of mutual knowledge needed to stabilize egoistic micro-systems is easier to bring about in such circumstances than the kinds of knowledge involved in ‘thick trust’. Moreover, this impersonality of modernity brings with it some well-known positive values that depend on mutual personal ignorance: freedom and the benefits of privacy - privacy not merely for the ego but for shared personal life which is genuinely personal.

Citation: Williams, Bernard (2000) ‘Formal Structures and Social Reality’, in Gambetta,Diego (ed.) Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations, electronic edition, Department of Sociology, University of Oxford