ABSTRACT
Over the past few decades, transparency 1 in the handling of public affairs has become an increasing requirement. It is nowadays considered simultaneously a basic feature of good governance and a protection against misrule. This coincides with greater expectations from the public regarding the availability, accessibility and diffusion of information. Such great enthusiasm for transparency – which comes not only from public opinion and the media but also from entrepreneurs in civil and political life – is in fact multidimensional; many hopes have been associated with the requirement of transparency in public affairs. Among these hopes are an improvement of the moralization of politics, greater confidence and consent of the governed, and a capacity for the public to form its judgement in a more enlightened way. 2 Among these factors that speak to the application of the principle of transparency, the confidence of the governed has played a very decisive role in political thought. In this essay, I will focus on the question of trust as a major argument for those who promote the principle of transparency. This essay will be developed along these two temporal axes: first, I would like to come back to the period of the emergence of representative government (late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century), where writers such as Jeremy Bentham and Benjamin Constant showed how transparency could engender the trust of the governed. Second, I would like to come back to the contemporary arguments that viewed this relationship between transparency and trust of the governed in various and less optimistic ways. In this contribution, I have adopted Hardin’s definition of trust:
Usually, to say that I trust you in some context simply means that I think you will be trustworthy toward me in that context. Hence to ask any question about trust is implicitly to ask about the reasons for thinking the relevant party to be trustworthy. 3
