Trust and Rule [Paperback]

This 2005 book provides an essential background to the explanation of democratization and de-democratization.People rely on networks of strong ties to other people for a wide range of risky long-term activities such as marrying, raising children, sustaining distinctive religions, and carrying on long-distance trade. What happens when those networks confront political regimes that could regulate them, destroy them, or seize their assets? Trust and Rule uses a wide range of historical and contemporary evidence to map and explain different sorts of encounters between networks and political authorities, including their implications for democracy.People rely on networks of strong ties to other people for a wide range of risky long-term activities such as marrying, raising children, sustaining distinctive religions, and carrying on long-distance trade. What happens when those networks confront political regimes that could regulate them, destroy them, or seize their assets? Trust and Rule uses a wide range of historical and contemporary evidence to map and explain different sorts of encounters between networks and political authorities, including their implications for democracy.Rightly fearing that unscrupulous rulers would break them up, seize their resources, or submit them to damaging forms of intervention, strong networks of trust such as kinship groups, clandestine religious sects, and trade diasporas have historically insulated themselves from political control by a variety of strategies. Drawing on a vast range of comparisons over time and space, Charles Tilly asks and answers how, and with what consequences, members of trust networks have evaded, compromised with, or even sought connections with political regimes.1. Relations of trust and distrust; 2. How and why trust networks work; 3. Transformations of trust networks; 4. Trust networks versus predators; 5. From segregation to integration; 6. Trust and democratization; 7. Future trust networks. Not since Max Weblƒ"