ABSTRACT
A dialectical-historicist view of trust can be taken further if we consider the anthropological theory of reciprocity initiated by Marcel Mauss. This is placed in the context of the notion of ‘moral economy,’ and hence trust may be viewed as a set of (largely unspoken) customs and understandings about mutual obligations, debts, credits, gift-exchanges, etc. In contradiction of this, however, Jacques Derrida’s discourses on giving and forgiving invite us to rethink trust as a basically ‘impossible’ gesture that cannot rely upon calculated or conditional exchanges and balances between or among us. The antinomy of conditional and unconditional versions of political trust is thus illustrated and expanded upon through observations of contemporary political problems, using the examples of Catalonia and the Donbass, and (to borrow from Edmund Burke) ‘the present discontents.’
