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Trust: How We Lost it and How to Get it Back
The updated edition of the bestselling title, Trust is the first serious response to the era of post-financial and political meltdown, Dr. Anthony Seldon lays out a blueprint for regaining trust within the national life. In part a wide-ranging meditation on notions of trust and responsibility in civic society, Trust is a powerful and important analysis of ten essential areas where trust in national life has broken down. Using examples from throughout the world and from history, it offers ten solutions for a better, more positive future.
256 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2009
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29 people want to read
About the author
Anthony Seldon
85 books74 followersSir Anthony Francis Seldon, FRSA, FRHistS, FKC, is a British educator and contemporary historian. He was the 13th Master (headmaster) of Wellington College, one of Britain's co-educational independent boarding schools. In 2009, he set up The Wellington Academy, the first state school to carry the name of its founding independent school. He was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham from 2015 to 2020. Seldon was knighted in the 2014 Birthday Honours for services to education and modern political history.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
November 30, 2025
Anthony Seldon tunnetaan eri brittipääministereiden vuosista vallassa kirjoittaneena historioitsijana. Finanssikriisin jälkimainingeissa hän on kirjoittanut myös katsaukseen luottamukseen. Näkökulma on Iso-Britannia ja siellä luottamusta ravistelleet kriisit, kuten parlamentaarikkojen kuluskandaali. Seldon pohtii hän myös toimia, joilla luottamusta voisi vahvistaa. Arvoa on luottamusta koskevilla pohdinnoilla, mutta myöhempi teknologinen ja muu kehitys saa kirjan välillä tuntumaan hassulta.
August 1, 2020
I found this book to be clearly written and it addressed the subject thoroughly and in a thought-provoking manner.
The premise that trust is important to all of us seems sound, but I wasn't convinced that trust was especially threatened at the time of writing (2009), nor did I think that most of the proposed solutions were especially plausible.
Nonetheless, well worth reading.
The premise that trust is important to all of us seems sound, but I wasn't convinced that trust was especially threatened at the time of writing (2009), nor did I think that most of the proposed solutions were especially plausible.
Nonetheless, well worth reading.
November 18, 2012
An interesting attempt to provide a blueprint for change based on enhancing trust within all spheres of society, but I came away unconvinced by the proposals put forward. The style is readable, although at times comes over as a rather wearying ticking off by a school master (we need to do this, we should do this, etc etc.), and is also rather repetitive by the latter parts of the book where the same prescriptions are provided for most of our ills. However, for me the fundamental problem with the book is that it all feels like tinkering around the edges rather than addressing what I would argue are deep systemic problems inherent in our political and economic systems. I think that any loss of trust that has come about is a symptom, not the cause of many of the problems espoused. Focusing purely on developing trust is like "curing" measles by painting over the spots; it may make things look a little better, but the problems have not gone away. If all the author's recommendations are implemented, then I don't believe society would actually look that much different; in particular there would still be grotesque inequalities in wealth: for instance there will still be very few people who can afford to send their offspring to Wellington School, where the author is headmaster, at almost £30,000 a year, to experience first hand what appears to have been the blueprint for a lot of the ideas in the book (more team sports, more arts and culture, lots of decency and politeness). It is rather easy decrying consumerism and anti-social behaviour from atop an ivory tower so high and gilded.
Successive British governments, starting with Thatcher (who Seldon seems to be quite an admirer of) have eroded communities, and misused their powers, whilst placing their own short term plans for re-election above any real intent to address longer term issues such as environmental degradation or growing levels of inequality. Of course it would be lovely if people were generally nicer, better behaved, and more deserving of trust, but exhorting them to be so is unlikely to work quickly enough to address the literally earth threatening challenges we will face over the next few decades. The only way to address such massive dislocations with enough urgency would seem to be a rejection of capitalism, with its fundamental and inexorable focus on economic growth. The goal of humanity does not need to be, and cannot sustainably continue to be, ever increasing economic wellbeing. Rather than "trust" perhaps it would be better to focus on the concept of "fairness". That just may produce some truly radical suggestions to address the fact that we live on a planet where almost 1 billion people are starving, and about the same number are obese; or the fact that we are destroying the planet and squandering fossil fuels at such a disgusting rate. Unfortunately this very conservative, and individualistic focus on trust, is unlikely to prove a cure for the problems we face.
Successive British governments, starting with Thatcher (who Seldon seems to be quite an admirer of) have eroded communities, and misused their powers, whilst placing their own short term plans for re-election above any real intent to address longer term issues such as environmental degradation or growing levels of inequality. Of course it would be lovely if people were generally nicer, better behaved, and more deserving of trust, but exhorting them to be so is unlikely to work quickly enough to address the literally earth threatening challenges we will face over the next few decades. The only way to address such massive dislocations with enough urgency would seem to be a rejection of capitalism, with its fundamental and inexorable focus on economic growth. The goal of humanity does not need to be, and cannot sustainably continue to be, ever increasing economic wellbeing. Rather than "trust" perhaps it would be better to focus on the concept of "fairness". That just may produce some truly radical suggestions to address the fact that we live on a planet where almost 1 billion people are starving, and about the same number are obese; or the fact that we are destroying the planet and squandering fossil fuels at such a disgusting rate. Unfortunately this very conservative, and individualistic focus on trust, is unlikely to prove a cure for the problems we face.
November 18, 2013
It takes skill to make a book this boring about a topic this interesting.
JDN 2456615 PDT 11:37.
A review of Trust by Anthony Seldon
I had high hopes for this book; the importance of trust—and trustworthiness—in the functioning of society is difficult to overstate. Moreover, it has been generally ignored by most economists. Psychologists and sociologists have generally been better. Seldon is none of the above.
Unfortunately, Seldon spends huge swaths of page reiterating banal platitudes, and his citations have the character of a frosh undergrad's paper: he will cite Aristotle—with footnotes—as though nobody already knows Aristotle and furthermore philosophy has not gone anywhere interesting in the last 2000 years.
Obviously some sort of accomodationist atheist, Seldon tiptoes around religion in several passages, often chiding the "aggressive" atheists (he particularly singles out the Four Horsemen, who may be the only atheists he's actually read) for failing to recognize the good that religion does in building trust in society. He makes no attempt to argue that religion is actually true, but merely hopes we will appreciate that it is beneficial.
He bemoans a "loss of trust" in society, which he attributes to the usual conservative complaints: Secularization, undermining of traditional family values, that sort of thing. He offers no data whatsoever to support this contention, probably because none exist. Writing in 2009, he could have said some very interesting things about the collapse of trust in our financial system due to the Second Depression and many of the frauds and scandals uncovered within it; being British, he would have been wise to focus on LIBOR in particular. But instead he ignores this interesting short-term loss in trust, focusing instead on a supposed long-term degradation of trust that does not appear to have any basis in reality.
JDN 2456615 PDT 11:37.
A review of Trust by Anthony Seldon
I had high hopes for this book; the importance of trust—and trustworthiness—in the functioning of society is difficult to overstate. Moreover, it has been generally ignored by most economists. Psychologists and sociologists have generally been better. Seldon is none of the above.
Unfortunately, Seldon spends huge swaths of page reiterating banal platitudes, and his citations have the character of a frosh undergrad's paper: he will cite Aristotle—with footnotes—as though nobody already knows Aristotle and furthermore philosophy has not gone anywhere interesting in the last 2000 years.
Obviously some sort of accomodationist atheist, Seldon tiptoes around religion in several passages, often chiding the "aggressive" atheists (he particularly singles out the Four Horsemen, who may be the only atheists he's actually read) for failing to recognize the good that religion does in building trust in society. He makes no attempt to argue that religion is actually true, but merely hopes we will appreciate that it is beneficial.
He bemoans a "loss of trust" in society, which he attributes to the usual conservative complaints: Secularization, undermining of traditional family values, that sort of thing. He offers no data whatsoever to support this contention, probably because none exist. Writing in 2009, he could have said some very interesting things about the collapse of trust in our financial system due to the Second Depression and many of the frauds and scandals uncovered within it; being British, he would have been wise to focus on LIBOR in particular. But instead he ignores this interesting short-term loss in trust, focusing instead on a supposed long-term degradation of trust that does not appear to have any basis in reality.
April 6, 2018
Abandoned on page 12 of 217. Two printing errors already. Mainly though I hated the style. I can’t describe it but it grated on me and I didn’t feel pulled into the book. It felt like bullet points were being thrown at me.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews