Revitalizing Baier: A Developmental Interpretation of “Trust and Antitrust”

Annette Baier’s 1986 essay “Trust and Antitrust” is widely recognized as the starting point of the philosophical literature on trust. However, references to it focus disproportionately on two claims Baier makes in the essay’s opening section. I argue that as a result of this lopsided attention, Baier’s critical engagement with the history of philosophy is obscured, and essential features of her account of trust are overlooked. To fill this lacuna, I offer a developmental interpretation of the essay and contextualize it within the wider trajectory of her work. My interpretation pulls Baier’s emphasis on the embodied experience of trust into focus and tracks the way she uses climate as a metaphor to describe how trust operates.