Paul Seabright's The Company of Strangers, is a study of the importance of trust in strangers in our everyday lives.
Descartes tells us that our thought is the only sure evidence that we are anything at all.
Seabright challenges the assumption that humans exist in primarily competitive relations with each other, and points out instead that our everyday lives are dependent on the capacity to trust that others will act in predictable ways that sustain the institutions on which we all rely.
The stranger, comes today and stays tomorrow. The stranger is a member of the group in which he lives and participates and yet remains distant from other – Native – members of the group.
This underestimates the degree to which mutually sustaining behaviour is culturally coerced, and by what means, and it provides a weak account of anti-cooperative decision making.