Oxford University Press, USA
Trust: A History
Key Metrics
- Geoffrey Hosking
- Oxford University Press, USA
- Hardcover
- 9780198712381
- 9.3 X 6.4 X 0.8 inches
- 1.15 pounds
- Business & Economics > Economic Conditions
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
Geoffrey Hosking argues that social trust is mediated through symbolic systems, such as religion and money, and the institutions associated with them, churches and banks. Historically, these institutions have nourished trust, but the resulting trust networks have tended to create quite tough boundaries around themselves, across which distrust is projected against outsiders. Hosking also shows how nation-states have been particularly good at absorbing symbolic systems and generating trust among large numbers of people, while also erecting rigid boundaries around themselves, despite an increasingly global economy. He asserts that in the modern world, it has become common to entrust major resources to institutions we know little about, and suggests that we need to learn from historical experience and temper this with more traditional forms of trust, or become an ever more distrustful society, with potentially very destabilising consequences.
Author Bio
Geoffrey Hosking, one of the world’s preeminent scholars of Russian history, provides a unique perspective on the rapid changes the country experienced in the late 1980s. Other books have focused on the political changes that took place under Gorbachev; Hosking’s lively analysis illuminates the social, cultural, and historical developments that created the need—and openness—for sweeping political and economic change.
Los Angeles Times Historical Book Prize in 1986 was awarded to A History of the Soviet Union and History Book Prize U.S. Independent Publishers in 2002 was awarded to Russia and the Russians: A History.
Source: and Harvard University Press and The British Academy
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