working for the creation of international and national co-operation by all left-
wing parties inpopular frontgovernments. In any case plenty of other
Marxist leaders, notably RosaLuxemburg, were equally opposed to Lenin’s
views on centralized party authority. Trotskyism has enjoyed a something of a
rebirth with the far-left as Marxist critics of society seek a new rallying point
after the collapse of Soviet communism.
Trust
It may seem odd that such an ordinary and apparently non-technical word as
trust could be an important social science concept, but it is rapidly coming to
be seriously studied, especially by advocates ofsocial capitalas an analytic
framework. Trust does not mean anything more to a political scientist that it
does to a layman, but it is the recognition by academe of the importance of
trust that is new. It is a blunt fact that societies differ enormously in the extent
to which individuals typically trust each other. It has always been recognized
that trust in social institutions varies considerably. Much of the early work on
political culturewas largely taken up by measuring the extent to which
citizens trusted their political leaders and institutions. Several Western coun-
tries scored very poorly on such indicators, but it was the beginning of the
democratic transitionsin Eastern Europe that made social scientists look
again at the phenomenon. Not only the old communist institutions, but even
the new ones, particularly the parties and parliaments, seem to engender very
little trust in the citizenry.
Although there are, in some countries, fairly good reasons for distrusting the
new political e ́lites, it has become obvious that this pervasive mistrust is often
just a reflection of a generalized distrust in ‘others’. Anthropologists have long
realized that cultures vary enormously on this basic question. Some societies,
not only primitive societies but also advanced ones such as modern Italy,
display an intense ‘familialism’ such that only those to whom one can trace a
family connection can ever really be trusted to be honest and reliable. In other
societies there may be high levels of trust within subcultures, but intense
distrust of other groups, especially, and inevitably, of immigrants. Where there
is such a deep distrust of the stranger, it is almost impossible to develop distant
political institutions that are trusted. This has very serious implications for the
legitimacy of states, and for their capacity to extract social effort in crisis
situations. The theoretical problem is that of the direction of causation: does
unwillingness by the individual to trust others cause, or stem from, distrust of
social and political institutions? It is often pointed out, for example, that
societies in theBalkanshave very low levels of trust, arguably because they
were governed for so long by the corrupt and alien Ottoman Empire. The
Trust