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Author: Michelle Meagher
Genres: Non-fiction
Generation Reset excavates an overlooked tradition running through millennia of law: private ownership was never meant to be permanent. From reverting bridge charters and expiring patents to term limits and time-limited copyright, reversion is already built into how societies work, and Michelle Meagher, a lawyer who spent years on the side of consolidating power before turning to interrogate it, argues that the same logic can and should apply to the biggest concentrations of wealth.
Structured as a journey through the doors of political and economic thought she has opened across her career, moving from how to reclaim political imagination through to releasing entrenched dominion and sounding a modern jubilee, the book shows there is a real legal mechanism at the heart of the argument: the ability to revert property to the commons without compensation, legally and democratically. It makes the case that our paralysis isn't a failure of ideas but a failure of permitted moves, and that democracy itself needs to be empowered for renewal so that it can repurpose the economy for the people. The argument arrives at a moment when democratic socialists in America and figures like Andy Burnham in the UK are already asking hard questions about ownership in everything from consumer debt to essential utilities and Big Tech.
For readers of Sathnam Sanghera's Empireland, Naomi Klein's Doppelganger, and Rutger Bregman's Utopia for Realists.
Author: Michelle Meagher
Genres: Non-fiction
Generation Reset excavates an overlooked tradition running through millennia of law: private ownership was never meant to be permanent. From reverting bridge charters and expiring patents to term limits and time-limited copyright, reversion is already built into how societies work, and Michelle Meagher, a lawyer who spent years on the side of consolidating power before turning to interrogate it, argues that the same logic can and should apply to the biggest concentrations of wealth.
Structured as a journey through the doors of political and economic thought she has opened across her career, moving from how to reclaim political imagination through to releasing entrenched dominion and sounding a modern jubilee, the book shows there is a real legal mechanism at the heart of the argument: the ability to revert property to the commons without compensation, legally and democratically. It makes the case that our paralysis isn't a failure of ideas but a failure of permitted moves, and that democracy itself needs to be empowered for renewal so that it can repurpose the economy for the people. The argument arrives at a moment when democratic socialists in America and figures like Andy Burnham in the UK are already asking hard questions about ownership in everything from consumer debt to essential utilities and Big Tech.
For readers of Sathnam Sanghera's Empireland, Naomi Klein's Doppelganger, and Rutger Bregman's Utopia for Realists.