This chapter paints a picture of modernity as a fragmented and legally regulated power structure underwritten by a state monopoly on violence. This power structure allows functional differentiation to thrive and determines modernity's practices of social trust. It also defines the risks: institutions licensed to use violence that cannot themselves be controlled by violence; the deregulation of the entire power structure should those institutions turn against the state; the subversion of the power structure when too much of the population participates in violence. These risks can be described as crises of trust, and crises of trust are always crises of trust about the trust of others.