A series of populist events, such as BREXIT, the elections of leaders such as Donald Trump and Robert Duterte, and student revolts in South Africa, roll across the world today. One of the key causes is often thought to be distrust of governments, the elites that occupy them, and the institutions that they operate. Further, in public discussion, this distrust is thought in some way to be corrosive of the very legitimacy of these regimes, even if they are democratic. Actors, on all sides of politics are asking themselves, how can they rebuild trust between the people and government?
This public discussion discloses a strong intuition that trust and distrust are of critical importance in politics and, in fact go to the very heart of any government’s right to rule. However, this intuition goes almost entirely unexamined in contemporary political philosophy. Whilst, the dominant liberal analytic theories say little about the value of trustworthiness or the disvalue of distrust, they say almost nothing about whether trust is a necessary condition for government legitimacy, or whether reasonable distrust can corrode our obligations to others and to obey government.
This paper explores ways to fill this gap.
