The Crisis of Institutional Trust, 1970–2020

Abstract

This chapter explores the crisis of trust in British and American political, legal, financial, and ecclesiastical institutions during the past fifty years. It compares the loss of institutional trust in the early modern period with that of the recent past, recognizing the much larger number and greater complexity of present-day political, legal, financial, commercial, and ecclesiastical institutions. It deals with the growing distrust of state and municipal as well as national institutions, the movement for jury nullification, the Bernie Madoff scandal, the widespread loss of confidence in American corporations, and the defection of Christians from mainstream churches. It also discusses the unprecedented distrust of the news media, which had no parallel in the early modern period. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the Trump administration’s distrust of fact-based knowledge, especially science, and its broader war on truth itself, which the eighteenth-century philosophers considered the main criterion for trusting other people.