2.1. Access-based consumption

The societal transformation upon which the WEF prediction is most firmly premised was identified over half a century ago (Fundin et al., 2012) and is sometimes called ‘access-based consumption’ (ABC) (Lawson et al., 2016). It involves the sale and supply of a ‘service’ in the form of the right to use a thing, rather than of a ‘product’ in the form of the thing itself (Lawson et al., 2016). Ownership of the thing is never conveyed as part of the transaction between supplier and consumer (Bardhi & Eckhardt, 2012). Auken described the performance of the transformed transaction; rather than owning kitchen equipment, say a pasta-maker, it would be delivered to the user upon request, whereupon it would be temporarily possessed, used, and then return to the supplier. The user would thus be able to achieve the same result, in this case to make pasta, otherwise than through owning the thing with which she did so.

ABC is promoted as part of the movement toward a more sustainable future (Bardhi and Eckhardt, 2012). Where a thing is consumed as a service rather than bought and owned as a product, the consumptive act, or at least its effect, is reasoned to be reduced (Armstrong et al., 2015, Frenken and Schor, 2017). The reduction takes form ultimately as a decrease in the quantity of raw materials that are consumed by society, an outcome which would itself be environmentally advantageous (Sun, 2021). This outcome is sought to be achieved through the effective and efficient use of fewer things more intensively within a transformed market economy (Lawson et al., 2016). The broader availability, accessibility, and use of those fewer things as a service by a greater number of individuals reduces (and could conceivably eliminate) demand for individual ownership of those same things (Fritze et al., 2020, Roblek et al., 2021). This corresponds, it has been hypothesised (Frenken & Schor, 2017), with lower required production levels, and thus less raw material usage.

ABC proceeds on the basis that we can have ‘more with less’. It requires no change to the substance of the consumptive act – we still get our homemade pasta. But the form of the supply changes from material good to immaterial service (Fritze et al., 2020) and there is, consequently, a change to the nature of the legal relationship between supplier and consumer (Minami et al., 2021), both of whom behave differently as a result. These changes, which give reality to the transformed transaction, not only concern property but, crucially, are facilitated by it (Schwanholz and Leipold, 2020).

The legal relationship between the supplier of a thing as a service and the consumer of it is essentially property based. It depends on there being an ultimate owner(s) of the thing supplied who has the legal right to grant the lesser possession and usage rights. By transferring possession of a thing to a consumer as part of a service but preserving ownership of it, this being the essence of the transformed transaction, a bailment will typically arise. Supplier and consumer would become, at law, bailor and bailee respectively, and this operates to bring them into a property relationship not only with each other, but also with the thing itself – which remains an object of property. The product-to-service shift of ABC thus completely preserves not only property as an institution, but also all the features of it, including ownership (Bardhi and Eckhardt, 2012). It merely operates to preference the supplier in the allocation of ownership rights and the exploitation of them, with a possible consequence of this being a reduction in ownership by the consumer, perhaps even to the point where, as the WEF predicts, she owns nothing.

2.2. The circular and sharing economy

The ‘circular economy’ (CE) is a societal transformation to which Auken specifically alluded in her post. She predicted its greater emergence because, in the future, “…no one has an interest in things with a short life-span” (Auken, 2016). Auken associates this transformation with ABC by reasoning that, especially when they are supplied as a service, things will be produced to maximise their “durability, repairability and recyclability” (Auken, 2016). While the latter attribute is clearly directed to the CE, the former two enhance, at least as much, opportunities for the development of the sharing economy (SE). The CE and SE are inter-related and are concerned with maximising the resource, consumptive, and economic value of things at all stages of their effective life, and then beyond it (Schwanholz and Leipold, 2020).

The CE is mostly directed toward environmental sustainability through the management of things at the end of their effective life (Schwanholz and Leipold, 2020). It regards expired things as a waste resource that can be used as a substitute for the raw materials that would otherwise be used in the production process (Korhonen et al., 2018). By recycling, repairing, and reusing expired things, perhaps even by harnessing biological organisms to “…break down, fix or generate” them (Marjamaa and Makela, 2022, p. 8), and then redeploying them as new products, the CE moves away from traditional linear modes of production (Korhonen et al., 2018) to those motivated by zero-waste. Marjamaa and Makela thus identify one indicator of the success of CE as a significant reduction in the quantity of expired things ending up in landfill (Marjamaa and Makela, 2022).

While one aspect of the CE does involve the extended use of a thing during its effective life, for example through platforms like eBay that facilitate the resale of mostly used things (Frenken & Schor, 2017), it is the SE that is more directly concerned with doing so. At the heart of the SE is the exploitation of surplus capacity (Schwanholz and Leipold, 2020; Frenken and Schor, 2017), of which there appears to be a significant amount. Research suggests, for instance, that the average privately owned car in a Western society might sit idle for over 90% of its effective life (Korhonen et al., 2018, Sacks, 2011). Recognising this, Belk, whose scholarship has greatly contributed to our understanding of the human-thing relations (Belk, 1988), but who has been sceptical of the willingness of humans to tolerate the severing of ownership (Belk, 2007, Belk, 2007), has conceded that sharing makes a “…great deal of practical and economic sense…” (Belk, 2014, p. 1599). By making an otherwise idle thing available to someone who needs the use of it, sharing results in efficiency gains (Martin, 2016). And when it is moved by monetary payment as it mostly is in the market-based SE (Bucher et al., 2016), sharing converts redundancy to economic value (Alharthi et al., 2021), providing the opportunity for the emergence of new businesses eager to realise some of that value (Korhonen et al., 2018), including third-party intermediaries (Heinrichs, 2013).

The SE can deliver sustainability outcomes (Dabbous & Tarhini, 2021). For instance, bike-sharing “…dramatically decreases traffic, reduces energy consumption, decreases harmful gas emissions, improves public health generally, and promotes economic growth” (Qiu and He, 2018, p. 7). And it has been estimated that there could be around ten fewer cars on the road for every car participating in a car-sharing program (Lawson et al., 2016, Shaheen et al., 2012). A reduction in overall consumption might thus be possible if things were made available for broader use by those owning them. Ownership is, undoubtedly, a feature of the SE in any of its forms (Bucher et al., 2016). Even when it is not market-economy based, is not moved by monetary payment, and extends to mitigate surplus capacity via common, cooperative or shared models, ownership as a property concept continues to function and thus be relevant. Somewhat like ABC, such models merely invest, formally or otherwise, a non-individual entity with the paramount rights associated with ownership, and individual participants with something lesser in the form of a right of personal access, possession or participation. As for the market-economy based SE, the operating models of market leaders, such as Uber and Airbnb (Richthofen, 2022), suggest that the ownership of things used in the SE will remain at the individual level (Dellaert, 2018). This is because such models typically leverage the use (and capital value) of privately-owned things. Presumably, then, no business employing such a model would wish for the realisation of the WEF prediction.

Not only does the SE inherently involve continuity of ownership, but it also requires things to be owned to the point of surplus capacity. The SE relies on the willingness of owners, whether individual or collective, to participate (Frenken & Schor, 2017) by making capacity available to others (Dellaert, 2018) in the course of what is, essentially, a property-mediated transaction. By doing so, individuals would engage with property not only as consumers of things, but also as micro suppliers of the things they own (Ertz et al., 2016, Eckhardt et al., 2019). Property owners share use of their things with other consumers in the SE (Dellaert, 2018) and sell to them in the CE (Frenken and Schor, 2017). Both transformations, therefore, immerse individuals more deeply in the institution of property by having them engage more routinely, and in different capacities, in property-based relations. In short, property and ownership remain critical to the realisation of the societal transformations required to support the CE and SE.

2.3. Transformative drivers, realities, and outcomes

Our engagement with the transformative discourse reveals it to be alive to the various challenges associated with these societal transformations (Dabbous and Tarhini, 2021, Martin, 2016). It acknowledges that they tend to create new markets (Lawson et al., 2016, Frenken and Schor, 2017) and new ways to sell (Fundin et al., 2012). This gives rise to new opportunities for value extraction (Korhonen et al., 2018) in the form of increased revenue (Oliva and Kallenberg, 2003), capital (Levitt, 1965), and consumer data (Reinartz and Ulaga, 2008). Realising this new value is acknowledged to remain a driver of behaviour (Schwanholz and Leipold, 2020; Gunderson et al., 2018; Mi and Coffman, 2019).

The discourse is clear that, without more, the societal transformations that inform the WEF prediction are unlikely to manifest in the form of the ‘New Welfare’ growth scenario envisaged by Sessa and Ricci (Sessa and Ricci, 2014). Key features of future growth in that direction are that the profit-seeking supplier is substituted for one seeking principally to “…satisfy social needs and build local capital,” (Sessa and Ricci, 2014, p. 78) and that ‘enough’ becomes the dominant economic paradigm. These transformations contemplate neither. They do not just preserve the market economy (Schwanholz and Leipold, 2020; Martin, 2016) and the growth paradigm to which it is coupled (Nelson, 2016) – they enhance it (Frenken and Schor, 2017, Akenji, 2014). In what Hobson and Lynch referred to as ‘Capitalism 2.0′, suppliers are profit-incentivised to find new ways to supply more, while individuals as consumers (Hobson and Lynch, 2016) are given something of a psychological licence to satisfy their consumptive act by understanding it as environmentally friendly and socially acceptable (Akenji, 2014), a belief that can be cultivated through careful marketing, sometimes ‘Greenwashing’ (Urbański and ul Haque, 2020), of things by suppliers. Instead of asking consumers to question their consumption expectations, or indeed questioning the validity of the growth paradigm (Hobson and Lynch, 2016; Nelson, 2016), these societal transformations are mostly directed to how existing and future consumption can be satisfied alternatively (Fritze et al., 2020). But, in reality, alternative consumption does not necessarily involve the behaviour change that is conducive to sustainable outcomes.

Suppliers of personal electronic devices like mobile phones and laptop computers are not yet producing these products to have the “durability, repairability and recyclability” Auken hoped for (Auken, 2016). In fact, the effective life of such products continues to reduce (Islam et al., 2020) and consumers do not yet respond behaviourally by refusing them on account of this fact. Instead, they respond to increasingly sophisticated and effective marketing campaigns that promote technology and design advancements (Islam et al., 2020) by replacing their electronic devices even when they are still functional (Wilhelm et al., 2011, Ylä-Mella et al., 2015).

Consumers sometimes abuse and behave opportunistically with non-owned things, including share cars (Bardhi & Eckhardt, 2012) and bikes. Indeed, the destruction of bikes has led to the termination of share schemes in France (AFP, 2018), Belgium (Reuters Staff Writer, 2018) and Australia (ABC Staff Writer, 2018). In Melbourne, a municipal bike-share scheme was discontinued because of a lack of community engagement but, when they did engage with another scheme in that city, it was marked by behaviour that saw the bikes thrown into the river and hung from trees. A study looking at shared e-scooters determined that maltreatment could reduce effective-life of the equipment to just three months of useful service, at which point the schemes are unprofitable (Schellong et al., 2019). When used as part of a share scheme, riders of e-scooters are more likely to be non-compliant (Haworth and Schramm, 2019, Cassidy, 2022) and there is a perception, at least, that riders, other road users, and pedestrians are exposed to an increased risk of injury. It appears that such perceptions contributed to the residents of Paris voting overwhelmingly to ban rental e-scooters in that city in April 2023 (Levine, 2023).

Quite apart from lack of behavioural change, the societal transformations have not generally resulted in reduced levels of production, consumption, or waste. Over the past five decades total energy produced and used has increased (York, 2016, Gunderson et al., 2018, Akenji, 2014). Despite growing societal awareness of the environmental harm it causes, the OECD predicts that the use of plastics will triple by 2060 (Agrawala et al., 2022). We know that plastic waste is not being used in the CE to any material extent and that it never has been (Greenpeace, 2022), despite claims to the contrary (ABC Staff Writer, 2018, ABC Staff Writer, 2022). As to e-waste, 80% of it still ends up as toxic landfill (Islam et al., 2020). E-waste is now the world’s leading form of waste product and, as the WEF has itself recognised, is likely to double in the coming years if not arrested (Platform for Accelerating the Circular Economy (PACE), 2019). There are examples of share scheme operators amassing quantities of product that far exceed the level required to meet demand (Hass, 2017; Mi and Coffman, 2019) and sending redundant shared products to scrapyards instead of opting for the more time-consuming option of redeploying them (Peters, 2020). If the effective life of shared products is disproportionately reduced, as has been observed for e-scooters (Severengiz et al., 2020) and bikes, the waste they generate will outweigh any environmental benefit they might otherwise deliver (Qiu and He, 2018; Mi and Coffman, 2019). Applying the indicator of success suggested by Marjamaa and Makela (2022), that is, by the quantity of things still ending up in landfill, provides one basis for concern; not only about the lack of realised outcomes to date, but also about assuming the capacity of the societal transformations to deliver them in the future (Velenturf and Purnell, 2021).

On 15 November 2022 the human population reached 8 billion.⁷ It is sensible, even if conservative, to suggest that a healthy planet probably cannot sustain the ecological footprint of this population (Bradshaw et al., 2021; Murphy et al., 2021; Turner, 2008; Nelson, 2016; Ehrlich, 2010; Hickel and Kallis, 2020; Hickel, 2019; Buchs & Koch, 2019), let alone the one that would materialise if individual consumption was equalised in the future based on levels that are now typical in the ‘developed’ world (Fioramonti et al., 2022). It is equally sensible to deduce from the discourse that a sustainable future is one in which there is a reduction in production, consumption, and their effects. Such reductions are a way to lessen the risk of realising the outcomes predicted by the Limits to growth report (Meadows et al., 1972). That report provided a vision of a future with which to work and, by so doing, is regarded to have “…advanced the development of futures thinking” and marked a turning point in the associated scholarship (Bell, 2001, p64). But, as the discourse makes clear, there has been no such turning point in reality and not enough has yet been done to avert the report’s dire conclusions (Turner, 2008; Turner and Alexander, 2014; Herrington, 2020; Kahn, 2022).

Notwithstanding their apparent lack of effectiveness to date, we accept that the discussed societal transformations and those like them probably are a part of the movement towards a more sustainable future (Velenturf and Purnell, 2021). We acknowledge the inroads they have made. But still more is needed. As Yaëll Emerich has recently observed (Emerich, 2023), some contend for more in the form of radical reconfigurations of society and its institutions beyond that which the societal transformations presently contemplate (Hobson and Lynch, 2016; Nelson, 2016) and this too may ultimately be a part of the forward movement. But we can yet find more within existing institutions and paradigms, none more so than property.

An image of a sustainable future (Marjamaa and Makela, 2022) should see property as a means by which relations and behaviours can be mediated to not only encourage people to contract their expectations in terms of consumption (Murphy et al., 2021), but facilitate them to do so. Property can be used to achieve these ends because of the capacity it has not only to mediate relations between people, but more critically between people and things. In a way that the WEF prediction does not understand or reflect, property and the concomitant of ownership is itself part of the movement towards a more sustainable future (Emerich, 2023). In property, we will find opportunities for the types of reconfigurations that help to realise that future, be they radical or otherwise. Property is thus part of the transformative agenda and should inform the discourse concerning it.

In the parts of this article that follow, we will show that ownership can be more diverse, more accommodating of human, societal, and environmental need, than is typically conceived. Ownership can support the types of societal movements that are encouraged by the proponents of, for example, degrowth (Alexander, 2012) and non-market ecosocialism (Nelson, 2016), both of which are often associated with the abolition of private property. It could even facilitate the hunter-gatherer way of life (Gowdy, 2020) from which we might yet learn a great deal (Ehrlich & Erhlich, 2022).

3.1. The predilection for things

One of the most remarkable learnings from the discovery of Otzi, the 40-year-old man whose remains were found on the Similaun Glacier in the Tirolean Ötztal Alps, was that he travelled and died with possessions. These included the clothes he wore, lithic tools in the form of blades and arrowheads, as well as a scraper, borer and some other bits in a belt pouch found near to him (Wierer et al., 2018). Otzi was an anatomically modern human who lived about 5,300 years ago (Miller, 2014). Finding him reveals that, at least that long ago, humans were behaving in a manner consistent with having a predilection for things. But evidence of such behaviour goes back much further.

Archaeologists believe that the very earliest of our human ancestors, probably Homo habilis (Leakey et al., 1964), may have transported lithic tools and the materials used to make them over distances of up to 13 kilometres (Davidson & McGrew, 2005). Intentional transportation is an enduring possessive act. As a behaviour, it indicates something important about the capacity of the transporter and the relation it has to the thing transported, including the fact that self, future-self, and self-interest might all be cognised (Jeffares, 2010). Non-human primates do not transport things in the manner, or over the distances, attributed to early hominins such as habilis (Osvath and Gardenfors, 2005). Chimpanzees, for instance, have not been observed to transport their tools more than a few hundred metres (Mercader et al., 2002).

Habilis lived over 2 million years ago (Villmoare et al., 2015). If we accept the archaeological literature as supporting the inferred behaviours of the very earliest hominins, including with respect to extended transportation, we can proceed on the basis that, when it comes to human-thing relations and associated behaviours, humans have always been different to non-human animals (Davidson and McGrew, 2005). Humans, it seems, have always had a predilection for things. The lithic record reflects that it only became more pronounced, and more deeply embedded, as the human genus evolved. When anatomically modern humans emerged about 300,000 years ago (Stringer, 2016, Gowdy, 2020), their behavioural repertoire was replete with the things upon which they then depended (Hodder, 2012, Childe, 2003 / 1936). These behaviours were clearly not the consequence of property but were, rather, causally responsible for it. Property is not an accident (Garnsey, 2007). Its universality as a feature of human society (Khan and Turri, 2022), the prevalence it has as a social institution (Rose, 2006), and its effectiveness as a coercive order (Kelsen, 1941), all tend toward property having its foundations firmly entrenched in the human condition. Property emerged because it is an aspect of the human condition to think about, and behave with, and through, things.

3.2. The emergence of property

The predilection for things motivates the emergence of a human-thing relationship in both thought and actuality. It is reasonable to suppose that Otzi, for example, thought about the things he possessed as if they were ‘his’, which then informed his behaviour in relation to such things (Pierce et al., 2003). He possessed and transported ‘his’ things as a means not only of securing the use of them but also, and perhaps more importantly, to convey to others that he perceived that the ‘things’ were ‘his’. The possessive behaviour, which likely extended to violence when challenged, was itself the form of communication (Rose, 1985). When it was received, other individuals might also have responded behaviourally.

Property law scholar James Krier has employed Game Theory to advance the likelihood of a survival-strategy-informed “predilection for deference to possession” (Krier, 2008, p. 34). In short, there is generally less risk in not interfering with the things possessed by another. In this deference behaviour, coupled with the innate sense of possession (Krier, 2009), Krier actually locates the genesis of property. His work offers an evolutionary theory of property that admits the possibility of property being ‘hard-wired’ in humans (Krier, 2008). Jeffrey Stake thinks similarly. Also a property scholar, Stake locates the ‘physical-control rule’ of property in biology to advance that humans have a property ‘instinct’ (Stake, 2004). This ‘instinct’ has many dimensions “…ranging from what constitutes property to what to do with property” (Stake, 2004, p. 1772). Stake thus sees the property rules of a society as having a foundation in the human condition, which would explain why property is so all-pervasive (Snare, 1972) and effective as a coercive order.

The still limited property law scholarship (Blumenthal, 2009) of the kind usefully contributed by Krier and Stake finds alignment within broader theoretical (Hodder, 2012, Malafouris, 2016), philosophical (Hegel, 1820/1896) and scientific discourse (Jones and Goldsmith, 2005; Pierce et al., 2003; Ellis, 1985). Here, we interpret the discourse as supporting not so much a biological basis for property itself, but more precisely for the human predilection for things. We suggest that this predilection might even operate at a cellular level to motivate the human-thing relationship that stimulates the neural processes (Hodder, 2012) that, in turn, inform the expression of human-thing behaviours. It is via these behaviours that the human person operates as an autonomous entity in the world (Dagan, 2020; Knowles, 1983). Property is the human construct that emerges principally to accommodate, mediate, and regulate the expression of these behaviours within a societal setting.

3.3. The substance of property and ownership

Property is not a ‘thing’ (Underkuffler, 2003, Christman, 1994, Penner, 1996). Bicycles, therefore, are not property, and nor are pasta-makers or cars. But these are each a ‘thing’ to which a human person can relate and with which she can behave. A thing is thus an object of property (Davies, 2016), as distinct from property itself. Property is a social and legal construct that formally recognises, in the form of rights and obligations prescribed by law (Macpherson, 1978), a relationship between a human and a thing (Snare, 1972). Any ‘thing’ can be recognised as existing in some relation to a human if a society agrees that it be so (Davies, 2020). It is the society, in fact, that determines not only the ‘things’ of property, but also the particular rules (Christman, 1994, Snare, 1972) for the use of those things (Freyfogle, 2012). These rules are the substance of property (Davies, 2020) and they take form and effect within human society as property law (Davies, 2016).

Jeremy Bentham said that “property and law are born together and die together” (Diamond, 1971). He was right, but only in a formal sense. As law, property is a human construct that does not exist outside of a human society (Freyfogle, 2012, Snare, 1972, Davies, 2016). But such a view of property fails to look beyond its substance to see that with which it is really concerned; namely, the human predilection for things and the behaviours that are expressed in consequence of it. Our knowledge of Otzi, and likely of early hominins like habilis too, strongly suggest that these behaviours existed many thousands of years before the emergence of property law (Krier, 2009) and thus exist independently of it. It is therefore unlikely that law or its absence could completely suppress the predilection that humans have to think about, and behave with and through, the external things of the world (Fritze et al., 2020). Things power the person (Hodder, 2012), and that is why individuals seek to possess them.

Possessive behaviour is a feature of all human societies (Ellis, 1985, Pierce et al., 2003) and is the behaviour with which property is most generally concerned (Rose, 1985). Ownership is a form of property that has “crystallized around” (Ellis, 1985, p. 128) certain types of possessive behaviour: that which manifests as enduring and personal, and which is often asserted as exclusive. The exclusivity aspect of ownership, which has become its most defining feature (Page, 2017, Christman, 1994), results in it being understood as a type of private, as opposed to public, property. Although the divide between the two types is more porous than might generally be acknowledged (Page, 2017, Freyfogle, 2012), ownership does denote the existence of a human-thing relationship that is qualitatively distinct (Snare, 1972).

We observed that Otzi probably related to the things found near to him as ‘his’. They likely were so in a way that the mountains he was traversing, and the streams from which he drank, were not. We can observe similar differences evident in Auken’s post – she refers to “my bike” and “my living room” as distinct from “our city”. The grammatical determiner in each case might appear benign, and may well be unintentional, but it likely communicates something about how Auken herself relates to these things: at some level, she regards the bike and the living room are ‘hers’ in a way, or to an extent, that the city is not; probably, then, she has taken ‘psychological ownership’ of these things to some degree (Pierce et al., 2003, Fritze et al., 2020).

Property law has developed in response to the human-thing relationship in all its manifestations. To ‘own’ a thing at law is different to ‘leasing’ or ‘renting’ it, which is different again from having the right to merely use or access it. The very fact of ownership as a property concept, but also its near universal presence as a feature of human society, suggests that the behaviour with which it is principally concerned, enduring possession, is a function of a particular kind of human-thing relationship. This leads us to regard ownership as a societal constant. While this position is informed by history and extrapolation therefrom, we avoid the challenge of Hume’s truism (Piirainen et al., 2012) by anchoring it in our understanding of the human condition. By so doing we operate within the confines of critical realism which has been accepted as a theory of knowledge appropriate for futures studies (Bell, 2001). It is with the personhood theory of property, however, that we locate and explain possessive behaviour, and thus ownership, as an aspect of the human condition.

3.4. Personhood theory of property

The personhood theory of property has its genesis in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Arnold, 2002, Alexander and Penalver, 2012;Knowles, 1983). In simple terms, it posits that a human becomes a person by relating to, and then behaving with, external things (Hegel, 1820/1896). Things have no will of their own and, therefore, they can contain the will of the person. When they do, things become the property of the person whose will they contain. Freedom is perhaps the most important concept in Hegelian philosophy (Hegel, 1899/1831; Patten, 1995) and while Hegel regards the person as inherently free, property is needed by the person to fully realise and express that freedom. Thus, both in Hegel’s philosophy generally and the personhood theory of property derived from it, there is a very close connection between the concepts of human, person, thought, behaviour, freedom, things, property, and ownership. By exploring just some of these connections, we can better understand the personhood theory as it relates specifically to ownership as a form of property.

A human is a subject, which means only that she is living and conscious. All animals are subjects according to Hegel. A person, however, is a subject who is aware of the fact that she is aware. A person therefore has her ‘self’, that is to say her subjective experience of life, as an object of her own thought. That capacity implies that she knows both what she is and what she is not. This knowledge, which arises in consequence of higher-order thought that Hegel regards as uniquely human, gives rise to cognitive freedom of the person. But, being cognitive, it is internal, and this leads Hegel to regard the person as ‘internally located’. The personhood theory regards ‘things’ as the “external sphere” of the internally located person (Hegel, 1820/, 1896). By relating to things in thought and then choosing to engage her free will, by which she translates her thought into behaviour, the person moves into the physical, objective, world. Things not only constitute the medium via which the subjective person gives herself this objective reality, but also embody the expressed free will of the person (Hegel, 1896; Alexander and Penalver, 2012). It is thus a core tenet of the personhood theory that persons are constituted in the things to which they relate and behave (Radin, 1982, Arnold, 2002).

Although the personhood theory might be characterised as essentially being a philosophical argument (Jones, 2011), its fundamental tenets do have empirical support (Alexander and Penalver, 2012, Belk, 1988). For example, research suggests that people take ‘psychological ownership’ of things (Pierce et al., 2003, Fritze et al., 2020, Kirk et al., 2018) and that this has ‘psychological consequences’ (Beggan, 1992). One consequence is the emergent feeling of ‘mine’ (Hood, 2011) that, as a phenomenological experience, is intimately associated with the sense of ‘me’ (Wang et al., 2015, Hood, 2011, Belk, 1988). A thing cannot be perceived as ‘mine’ unless there is first a feeling, an awareness, of ‘me’, which is nothing other than the internally located ‘self’ with which the personhood theory is concerned. But because what is ‘mine’ is the external manifestation of the inner-located ‘me’, there tends to be a conflation of the two such that, from a psychological perspective at least, what is ‘mine’ is actually ‘me’ (Wang et al., 2015). This would explain why a person might react so strongly to having such a thing taken away, or why giving or receiving a gift might be such an intimate experience; because it feels as though what is taken, given or received is not merely the thing, but a part of the ‘me’ constituted in it (Belk, 1988). This phenomenon would also explain the effectiveness of regimes that operate to deny property rights to certain classes of people; historically, this has included women (Davies, 2016), indigenous peoples, and penal convicts, and still today people held as prisoners. The intended consequence of excluding such people from the institution of property is to inhibit the sense of self (Hood, 2011) and, in this sense, it can be understood as a punitive act. The perception of it as such could explain something, at least, about the strong reaction to the WEF prediction.

The feeling of ‘mine’ is believed to emerge universally (Furby, 1991) in early in childhood (Nancekivell et al., 2019; Khan and Turri, 2022; Hood, 2011). It is expressed in the form of possessive behaviour and children tend to exhibit it more forcefully than adults (Khan and Turri, 2022). This could suggest that people learn to suppress the feeling of ‘mine’, and perhaps more broadly the contended for property ‘instinct’, as they mature. But, as Haider Riaz Khan and John Turri have suggested, to regard the feelings as unnatural would be misguided; they are “…a pervasive neurocognitive experience that constitutes the basic…sense of self” (Khan and Turri, 2022, p. 11). Such a view is materially consistent with the personhood theory of property.

The personhood theory of property enables us to understand not only the human predilection for things for which we contend, but also the function and justification for property and, indeed, ownership, which arises in consequence of it. The predilection exists to motivate the human to engage with things, both in thought and actuality, as a means of emerging in the physical world as a person (Radin, 1982). And since the person is constituted in the things to which she relates and behaves, access to such things must be assured (Radin, 1982). Property emerged to provide this assurance (Rousseau, 1968/1762), with ownership being the form of property that most effectively acts as the “normative fence” around the things in which the free will of the person is embodied (Waldron, 1988). Hegel asserted that all persons must own things (Hegel, 1896, Waldron, 1988). Margaret Radin, whose property law scholarship most explicitly extracted the personhood theory from Hegel’s philosophy, concluded similarly by expressing her view that the law should recognise the right for persons to own at least some things (Radin, 1982). Absent such a right, the opportunity to be and express personal autonomy and freedom, that is to say to be a human person, would be diminished (Waldron, 1988). This would have direct consequences for the capacity to be happy.