Abstract
Jürgen Mackert's On Social Closure aims to counteract a Western-centric sociology that does not consider the suffering of those at the bottom end of global social hierarchies. He critically analyzes how powerful actors deliberately improve their own position to the detriment of the less powerful. The world Mackert describes is a grim, Hobbesian one of constant struggle, in which social groups compete for life chances and survival, with exclusion, exploitation, and elimination as an unavoidable outcome. Such closure struggles, Mackert argues, are “an ineradicable element of all social life” (p. 137).
The book is 315 pages long and covers 23 chapters that vary in length from 2 to 128 pages. Mackert proceeds in four steps. First, he criticizes two earlier theories of social closure from the 1970s/80s by Frank Parkin and Raymond Murphy, which he convincingly dismisses for various reasons, including their narrow, economistic focus on closure via exclusion from resources in “advanced” capitalist societies alone. Second, he critically discusses several concepts that serve as building blocks for his own theory: Max Weber's ideas of social life as struggle, open/closed relationships, and life chances; power (drawing on Popitz, Giddens, and Mann), and opportunity structures (Dahrendorf and Merton). These considerations contain frequent previews and summaries and occupy the entire first half of the book. Some readers may find this procedure meticulous, others might become impatient to finally dive into Mackert's own theoretical propositions after a compelling critique of past work.
Third, in “the core of the book” (p. 135), Mackert depicts his new theory of social closure. It follows a relational approach: actors use power in social relations with the ultimate goal of increasing their life chances. In this process, power asymmetries emerge and stabilize, and social closure occurs in the forms of exclusion, exploitation, and elimination. Mackert links these three forms of closure to three “major global dynamics” (p. 6): neoliberalism, capitalism, and settler-colonialism. In neoliberalism, exclusion leads to the marginalization of social groups. In capitalism, well-organized elites exploit the less powerful, with extraction as the outcome. Finally, in settler-colonialism, “eliminators” employ strategies of annihilation against “those under threat of elimination.” Departing from Marxist approaches that see all power based on economic resources, Mackert argues that exclusion is predominantly linked to politico-legal, exploitation to economic, and elimination to military/violence-based resources of power. In addition, ideological power is important in legitimizing social closure. Mackert's conception is dynamic: as powerful actors deny the less powerful access to resources and opportunities, and by intervening to prevent their communities from organizing effectively, the life chances of the underdogs decrease further. Events are critical in these processes as windows of opportunity for change, but mostly they lead to further repression.
Fourth, Mackert illustrates his theoretical framework via three broad examples. He discusses neoliberal exclusion via evictions and austerity politics, using the 2008 financial crisis as a critical event. With regard to capitalism, he depicts how the pursuit of shareholder profit has led to slavery-like exploitation through forced labor. Finally, looking at Israel/Palestine, Mackert—who transparently discloses his personal connection with Palestine on the book's very first page—describes what he sees as settler-colonialist strategies of elimination.
The value of Mackert's novel theoretical framework lies in the innovative relational perspective, which manages to explain why inequalities persist: those at the bottom are kept from resisting or catching up. However, I also see several issues. While Mackert explicitly aims to overcome the narrowness of previous closure concepts and to develop a “general sociological tool” (p. 6), his typology is rather restrictive. It focusses on neoliberalism, capitalism, and settler-colonialism not as empirical cases, but as intrinsic parts of the theory itself. But this decision seems somewhat random. Just consider imperialism, protectionism, welfare chauvinism, right-wing authoritarianism, racism, antisemitism, xenophobia, misogyny, ablism, homo- or transphobia as further relevant phenomena that cannot readily be subsumed under these three “major global dynamics.” For example, the neo-protectionist tariffs imposed by Trump are anti-neoliberal (since they run against the free-trade paradigm), and yet they certainly produce social closure, e.g., by excluding foreign companies. The psychological level of in- and outgroup construction and the resulting “moral alchemy” (Merton 1948) are missing in this book, as are more inconspicuous forms of closure in everyday life (Delhey et al. 2014).
Mackert's decision to link elimination exclusively to settler-colonialism (p. 258) also seems questionable. There is no lack of historical cases where elimination is not primarily geared toward territorial gains of settlers at the expense of externalized indigenous “others,” but rather against an internal enemy. Just consider the Holocaust, the Great Purge under Stalin, the Cambodian genocide, or forced disappearances under Pinochet in Chile. Furthermore, the tripartite typology feels somewhat forced due to the strong overlap between neoliberalism and capitalism. Mackert defines neoliberalism as “the transformation of all social relations into markets” (p. 7). But since Marx, such commodification is also a core feature of capitalism. While Mackert tries to frame neoliberalism as primarily political and capitalism as economic, he is inconsistent in this regard, calling neoliberalism first “mainly a political project” (p. 14), then “a political and economic project” (p. 15), and finally “a political, economic, social, and cultural/ideological project” (p. 143).
More fundamentally, I wonder whether “social closure” is really the best term to describe what happens under neoliberalism/capitalism. After all, commodification forcefully incorporates people into global markets, which seem the precise opposite of closure. Exploitation, injustice, and suffering can (and will) still are the outcome of such an inclusion, but empirically, they are not the only one. Mackert portrays a world in which “the living and working conditions of billions of people around the world are deteriorating at an unprecedented rate” (p. 6). But in fact, a range of indicators suggests the contrary, even for the poorest: In rural China, e.g., the threshold daily income for being in the bottom 10% of the income distribution was 0.56$ in 1981; now it is almost ten times higher, 5.54$, adjusted for inflation (Our World in Data 2026). This is not to sugarcoat soaring inequalities, ongoing exploitation, and ecological destruction in a crisis-ridden world. But Mackert's analysis could have been more convincing if he had recognized some of the ambiguities inherent in the phenomena he studies.
This holds even more for his Manichean opposition between a “powerful side—the excluders, exploiters, and eliminators” and a “less powerful side—the excluded, the exploited, and those threatened with elimination” (pp. 6-7). For example, Mackert holds a “neoliberal financial elite” (p. 213) and “global capitalist elites” (p. 228) responsible for deliberately enforcing exclusion and exploitation. This ignores systemic feedback loops that enlarge existing disparities without strategic decision-making (Deutschmann 2025) and the fact that middle classes globally sustain this system, e.g., by buying stocks or real estate in the hope of social mobility or financial security. This latter omission is surprising given Mackert's strong reliance on Popitz, who in his famous cruise-ship allegory ascribes such intermediary actors a central function in stabilizing power structures.
With regard to the gravest form of social closure, the situation is clear for Mackert: the “settler-colonial state” of Israel and its allies are “eliminators” and Palestinians are “those threatened with being eliminated” (p. 258). While there is no doubt that horrendous injustice and existential harm are inflicted on Palestinians, Mackert's analysis is blatantly one-sided. He neglects military/violence-based acts against Israel that fall into the same category of social closure, regardless of any imbalance of power. For example, from 2001 to the present, no year has passed without rocket or mortar attacks against Israel (Jewish Virtual Library 2026). And if we zoom in on October 7, 2023, it is hard not to see Hamas as “eliminators,” the ca. 1200 Israelis who have been killed as “the eliminated,” and those abducted as “threatened with elimination.” Rather than acknowledging this, Mackert insinuates that the “Israeli military-ideology complex” intentionally created this event (main text on p. 268), and that Hamas's attack must be understood as the desperate response of those forced to live in a “concentration camp” to “Zionist fascism” (footnote on the same page). But what was killed on October 7 was not a fascist regime and not exclusively Israeli soldiers, but also hundreds of young people at a music festival and hundreds of civilians in Kibbutzim, some of whom had actively stood up for peace, equal rights, and reconciliation in the region (e.g., Vivian Silver, Hayim Katsman, and Hersh Goldberg-Polin). This deadly conflict is complex and ambiguous. The fact that Mackert does not concede this at all lowers the scientific value of his book.
Finally, Mackert's binary opposition paradoxically converts the groups he sides with into passive objects: they are excluded, exploited, and eliminated. But what about their own agency? While the author alludes to “strategies that the excluded, exploited, or those threatened with elimination can employ” (p. 16), he states that elaborating on them would go beyond the scope of this book. The only solution that is mentioned in passing is for the less powerful to close their community and develop a political identity (p. 159). But doesn’t this imply that even if successful, the outcome would be more closure and thus more exclusion, exploitation, or elimination? The world, if seen this way, is doomed to remain caught in a vicious cycle.
What about overcoming closure and establishing universal mechanisms of redistribution, access, and fairness? This possibility is not foreseen in Mackert's struggle paradigm. Closure struggles, he argues, are “struggles that cannot be terminated” (p. 175). But do we really live in a world where the pursuit of one's life chances is per se detrimental to others? And aren’t there countless historical examples where closure has successfully been curbed, from labor movements to the suffragettes to abolition to the end of apartheid? It is hoped that Mackert will write a second book on such counterstrategies to complement his theory, which despite its flaws constitutes a relevant point of departure for understanding social closure.
