MISTRUST IN SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS AS AN EXPRESSION OF THE POLITICAL AND CULTURAL CHANGE

This article aims to review some of the earliest phenomenon associated with the process of modernization: the growing distrust that people show towards social institutions. To this end, first a review of the intellectual foundations that favored the critique of traditional institutions will take place. Second, it presents a sociological description of the new situation that has arisen with modernity, where two institutions triumphed: the market and the state. Finally, it will consider that postmodernism has generated mistrust even the ruling institutions of modernity (although most of the state than of the market). Three processes that support this fact are targeted: increasing individualization, the rejection of history and the ubiquity of communication as a legitimizing process of human relations.