Closure, exclusion and the sex partnership
by Michael G. Heller
Published in Social Science Files, July 24, 2025
Enclosed field with rising sun, by Vincent van Gogh, 1889 France
New concepts
The concepts of ‘closure’ and ‘exclusion’ are now introduced in order to clarify the distinction between the constricted coupling of a man and a woman, which was a ‘social’ phenomenon that allowed for the consolidation of individual property with authority and domination, and, on the other hand, the political sociations which generated leadership and influence in society without dominance. Both are patterned as modes of decision making. The coupling relationship that eventually evolved into complex multilayered household authority was initially a simple unit for self-isolating ‘ownership’ over reproduction, production, and consumption. Society benefitted by absorbing coupling units for purposes of governance, group safety, and more complex divisions of labour and welfare. The logic of ‘closure’ can be interwoven theoretically with distinctions of physique, hormonal functions and heritable personality, which help explain primal sexual divisions in which women ‘influenced’ without ‘leading’.
The term ‘closure’ was one of Max Weber’s many conceptual innovations, which revolutionised social science and remain the essential starting point for studies such as the present one. Weber took an interest in developments in biology and psychology, while emphasising, nevertheless, that “without an intended meaning all events or circumstances — animate or inanimate, human or nonhuman — remain senseless so long as they cannot be related to the ‘means’ and ‘ends’ of human action”.1 The main limitation of Weber’s approach, from the present perspective, is that he did not seem able to theorise or classify the world that existed before the legal construct of ‘family’ and before the advent of rulership — “rulership is the chance that a command of a particular kind will be obeyed by given persons”2. In the event, these limitations do not impede us, since his analyses of sociation, communalisation, and closure more or less account for the three earlier modes of human governance, before rulership.
A social relationship is closed to outsiders to the extent that its substantive meaning or its prevailing rules exclude such participation, or restrict or permit it only according to specific conditions. Openness and closedness can be defined traditionally or affectively, by value or by purposive rationality. Rational closure can in particular arise for the following reasons: admission to a social relationship lends participants the Chance that inward or external interests can be satisfied, whether this be on account of the purpose of the relationship itself or because of its successful prosecution, whether it arises from solidaristic action or from a balance of interests. … A closed social relationship can secure its monopolised Chancen to participants in a number of ways. Such allocation might be (a) freely arrived at, (b) regulated or rationed by degree and form, or (c) appropriated on a more or less permanent basis by specific individuals or groups. This represents internal closure. [in Max Weber, Economy and Society, A New Translation, edited and translated by Keith Tribe, Harvard University Press, 2019:123]
Between primate alpha male dominance and the eventual human transition to what we should call ‘rulership’ there were, potentially, 200,000 years of experimentation with classifiable types of governed society — individual sociation, communalisation, and coordination. According to my argument, these intermediate sociations strove to minimise dominance, except insofar as the group as a whole ‘dominated’ over the individual with its threats — implicit or explicit — of punishment or expulsion.
A simultaneous relationship during these transitions to society was male-female closure. Couplings can be viewed as forms of rational closure and exclusion, not dissimilar to monopolisation.3 In many cases, following on from the preexisting patterns of primate behaviour, coupling might be preceded by fierce competition between males (sometimes also between females) to obtain direct access to the best endowed or seemingly most compatible sexual mates. As a social relationship, closure is often the result of an effort to exclude competitors. After the initial conflict and/or evaluation was complete, there would follow a probationary period during which the superficial first appearances and bravado declarations of intent could be subjected to testing and confirmation. A condition of initial coupling was that it be voluntary. It was also a negotiated relationship, the terms of which were decided by the man and the woman. In these respects, ‘coupling closure’ advanced in parallel with the broader process of incipient sociation, which itself was the trial and error method that allowed group insiders to monitor and then regulate the worthiness and compatibility of the acceptable people. Ideal, erotic, and affective desires had to be reconciled with the willingness and capability of each participant to deliver results in practical matters, and to contribute and conform to gradually evolving group customs and conventions.
A couple is like a society in that it presupposes an early sociational ‘closure’ in pursuit of ideal, status, material and procedural interests. Closure is voluntaristic in the sense that it involves identifiable interests in-common that can be sought and obtained as powers of disposal over particular utilities, which necessarily exclude others. Motives for closure include seeking a certain prestige and honour associated with a coupling. The principal motives are to create small monopolies of production, acquisition, and consumption, with small zones of control over private possessions and over children who then become the guarantors of future welfare and generational succession.
The only meaningful limitation on monopolistic closure within a coupling unit is third-party intervention by society. This occurs because the society has developed decision making mechanisms for creating and imposing rules on individuals who choose to remain. By remaining within society the individual is committed to obeying its ‘rules’ for governance. Every individual is free to exit one society and join another.
In old settings
Some of the motivational contexts were discussed earlier. We saw that incest and infanticide could not have been the principal motivations for coupling, because the effects of incest were unknown, and infanticide was, in the main, every mother’s self-protective ‘final resort’ survival measure. The concrete motivations of closure take us beyond speculative assumptions, such as that women evaluated male partners by their potential to sire smart and vigorous children, or that women sought male protection against violence in ungoverned and unsafe groups. Societies arose partly to eliminate danger. Prehistoric women had more urgent priorities than the ‘quality’ of children.
Nor can we be sure about the validity of some of the theories of primal instinct. A common assumption is that males sought to obtain certainty about the identity of their offspring. Yet this only became a conscious motivation in the Third Society, where paternity sometimes determined attainment of political ranks in decision making. It is also impossible to know whether men were subconsciously driven by a biological imperative to maximise their (infinitesimal!) contribution to the giant gene pool of humanity.4 Following Max Weber’s sage advice5, I focus on the incentives and affective motivations that drove meaningful ‘social action’ among prehistoric humans.
In order to know how the actions and thoughts of prehistoric people differed from those of their primate forbears we can identify realistic and utilitarian motivations that are revealed in actions of subsistence, safety, shelter, support, and stabilisation of groups. Male-female partnerships became the modus vivendi because each sex could more optimally perform different roles in pursuit of the common goals. As self-aware, rational beings with large brains, the objective of each was to manage their destiny.
Nevertheless, there would probably always have been two interweaving avenues of ‘destiny’ in play — one ideal and the other material. By ‘ideal interest’ I simply mean “motivation based on the intrinsic value of an action rather than the instrumental purpose of action”.6 In the ‘ideal’ zone women with maternal future-orientations may have been the perceptive diagnosticians and initiators of what I am describing here as an instinctual drive for ‘exclusive possession’. In the ‘material’ zone, which is largely concerned with acquisition of food and the processing of materials, it is probable that men and women had much more to negotiate about. Yet, in this material zone, male supremacy in dangerous (heroic) hunting greatly attenuated the scope for negotiation.
The elusive and subjective ideational deliberations by couples about general welfare might be reduced to the following choices. Regardless of gender, if they were mature, capable, strong, self-reliant and unencumbered healthy individuals with knowledge of subsistence requirements and means of defence against predators, it was in principle possible — though in practise very difficult and dangerous — for each to live alone without the protection of the group. Alternatively, they might have integrated within a cohesive group as uncoupled individuals. However, society itself and all its members needed to be future-oriented for survival. Everyone eventually reached a time in their life when they weakened and became more vulnerable and increasingly dependent on active and agreeable assistance from other individuals. In prehistory, the obvious optimal way to prepare for the future was to form a male-female unit for procreation and welfare. Intimate unions of men and women produce offspring who would care for them in old age and perpetuate their memories and symbolism after death. And, in the short term, there were the benefits of sharing and dividing daily responsibilities.
The creation of a reproductive unit enabled a couple to take control of joint destiny. The intimate reproductive union between man, woman and children results in sexual exclusion. As one analyst of the phenomenon observes, “in all but a very few societies in the world, two males almost never have simultaneous sexual access to the same reproducing female”.7 Nevertheless, while the control of sexual exclusion might be inevitable, it is one of multiple dimensions of prehistoric exclusion that must have sustained any enduring male-female coupling. Potentially all elements of subsistence, safety, shelter, support and stabilisation in a purposefully created ‘coupling unit’ could be subject to forms of exclusion, which we may as well call ‘property’ or ‘possession’.
The bilateral exclusion zone of male-female couples was the mirror of the scaled-up multilateral exclusion zone of the society they were in process of creating. When others in the group saw that the couple lived together intimately and were protective of each other, they knew the couple ‘owned’ each other exclusively. When the couple built a shelter or sectioned off a space inside the cave, they ‘owned’ this shared defence against the elements. When they produced children, they ‘owned’ children. After foraging for food they ‘owned’ that food, and gained prestige within the group by giving away surplus food. If they—or their grandparents—took responsibility for looking after each other in times of sickness or incapacity it was because they ‘owned’ each other. If the couple acted as a single ‘individual unit’ when contributing to the stabilisation of the ‘group unit’ in communal processes of governance and decision making, they acted as though in rightful ‘joint representation’ of their ‘intimate unit’. Such actions were symbolic of the presumptive small-scale communality that set apart the exclusionary male-female couple with its common possession and common goals.
This phenomenon of exclusive possession must have become characteristic of all early male-female coupling in simple, small evolving group societies 20,000 to 200,000 years ago — when brain size, language, and controlled emotions enabled monogamy and individualistic calculations about the means and ends of sustainable living. Coupled closure was an intelligent though largely instinctual self-generating response to the realities faced by decision-capable individuals in adverse prehistoric environments.
Conclusions
Couple closure was not necessarily a sanctioned rule-bound phenomenon of whole society governance. We could view it as an initial ideational yet rational objective of mutual possession that was loosely and incrementally formed as an awareness of the rationality of exclusive coupling in copulation, in the creation of discrete sleeping quarters, and in growth of intimacy, loyalty and protectiveness. These indistinct ‘ideal utilities’ of sustainable coupling must be distinguished from more overtly rational and concrete calculations of ‘material utilities’ that drove the coupled provisioning of food. Ideal utility is an afterthought to material utility in the context of a selective Stone Age evolutionary process of sociation. It was in methods of organising food acquisition that the initial, primary and stand-alone rationale for this male-female coupling emerged, regardless of any ‘ideal’ intimacy. It should be emphasised that we have touched only on one selective aspect of ‘interest’ that is at the forefront of this male-female segment of a wider analysis. The full range are — ideal interests, status interests, material interests, and procedural interests. Prehistoric status interest will emerge as one particularly relevant to hormonal determinants and personality traits.
In this section we examined the interplays of the very earliest phase of prehistoric sociation and coupling in terms of ‘closure’ and ‘exclusion’. Couples closed themselves to outsiders. They formed subunits of society with considerable effective autonomy. Within their monopolistic shelter it was possible for primal power-authority to be cultivated and exercised only if it did not interfere with their cooperative negotiations about divisions of labour, and only when it did not conflict with rules formulated and exercised at the level of group decision making and governance (rules about violence, possession, and truthfulness). Coupling closure was a form in which some possessions were detached or ‘alienated’ from the group, and exclusive to the male-female subunit, by means of preventing participation by the others who were outsiders. Coupling was therefore the first closed social relationship. There were aspects of life within it where society would not or could not intervene. Thus, closure was the origin of household production and administration, and of the legal entity of family and inheritance.
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FOOTNOTES
Max Weber, Economy and Society, A New Translation, edited and translated by Keith Tribe, Harvard University Press, 2019:134
“Closed relationships” can be “monopolistic”, as discussed in Max Weber, Economy and Society, A New Translation, edited and translated by Keith Tribe, Harvard University Press, 2019:123-126.
‘Closure’ as ‘monopolisation’ is also explored at length throughout Michael G. Heller, Capitalism, Institutions, and Economic Development, Routledge 2009.
Analyses that rely too heavily on assumptions about behaviour that maximises ‘genetic success’ tend to generate mechanical and deterministic interpretations of thoroughly ruthless male-female interactions, trade-offs and motivations. The exaggeration of gene maximisation’s “strings of largely unconscious cost/benefit analyses” is exemplified in Ian Morris, Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve, Princeton 2015:234-237.
Max Weber in Economy and Society: “There is the possibility that future research might also find regularities underlying action taken to be meaningful that cannot be understood, although this has not yet happened. Hereditary biological differences, for example, would have to be accepted by sociology as given data if statistically persuasive proof were produced indicating their influence on the form taken by sociologically relevant behaviour—that is, social action in its relation to meaning. Such acceptance would be equivalent to that granted to physiological facts such as the nature of nutritional need, or the effect of ageing on action. Recognition of its causal significance would not, of course, alter the tasks of sociology, or of the sciences of action in general, in the slightest; this would remain the construal and understanding of meaningfully oriented action.”
Michael G. Heller, Capitalism, Institutions, and Economic Development, Routledge 2009:183
Terrence W. Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain, W. W. Norton & Company 1998:385.