Townsley, EleanorBrangan, MichaelaTucker, KennethRuelo, Blessie2025-07-152025-07-152025-07-15https://hdl.handle.net/10166/6767This thesis will aim to understand how the establishment and subsequent development of Western human rights frameworks as the solution to social inequality has catalyzed neoliberal hegemony within The United States. By conceptualizing individual sovereignty through civil liberties and the right to private property, how has the instrumentalization of human rights fostered the liberal dimensions of progressive thinking and action? Using Karl Marx’s distinction between political and human emancipation as a basis for this piece, I will analyze and historicize his critique of rights with the contradictions of “universal liberty” demonstrated by the struggle for rights-based recognition fought not only by the bourgeois but marginalized and colonial identities during The French Revolution and The Haitian Revolution. I will then evaluate the post-socialist shift in the 1960-70s where class politics were joined by the emerging language of cultural recognition, examining the rise of Critical Legal Studies as a contemporaneous school of jurisprudential thought to understand how the critique of rights have either been extended or resisted by legal scholars in the advent of postmodernism. With the decline of rights critique in the 1960s, civil rights, in combination with the politicization of identity and multicultural meritocracy, have been instrumentalized to further what Nancy Fraser describes as a hegemonic bloc within the liberal-left called “progressive neoliberalism”. Drawing from Fraser’s claim that “cultural domination [supplanted] exploitation as the fundamental injustice”, I explore how rights frameworks can be remodeled to bridge between political and class struggle within the increasingly fragmented political landscape of The United States.enhuman rightsmarxismnew leftneoliberalismcritical legal studiesidentity politicsintersectionalityThesispublic