OMG this book is so good! This is the philosophical counterpart to Jason Lowery's Softwar. The basic idea put forth by Niklas Luhmann is that trust is required to reduce complexity and power is required to maintain the trust structure. Nothing to do with morals at all and one of the reasons why this work has been ignored by 'sociologists' whose starting point is from a moral theory.

Latest version was published in 2017, translated from original works published in German in the late 60s and early 70s.


https://www.wiley.com/en-ca/Trust+and+Power-p-9781509519453