UC Berkeley

Abstract

Humanity in Ruins? Liberal Disillusion and the Left Critique of Human Rights at the End of the Twentieth Century

by

Zachary-John Manfredi

Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric

University of California, Berkeley

Professors Wendy Brown and Pheng Cheah, Co-Chairs

This dissertation analyzes the discourses and practices of left political thinkers and activists in the Euro-Atlantic world who adopted the language of human rights in the fifty years after 1968. The dissertation investigates recent histories in order to distinguish socialist theories of human rights from the projects of post-war liberalism and neoliberalism. It examines invocations human rights across a variety of late twentieth and early twenty-first century scholarly literatures and political sites: 1970s and 80s anglophone Marxist debates about the reception of Eastern Bloc dissidents, the post-68 French Left’s reckoning with the failures of revolutionary politics, post-colonial struggles to restructure the global economy through the New International Economic Order and the right to development, and post-financial crisis social movements challenging corporate power, austerity, and structural racism in the United States. Through its historical excavations the dissertation challenges the characterization of socialism as inherently antagonistic to human rights. It argues that left thinkers turned to human rights in order to reassess the tradition of Marxist political and legal thought in light of twentieth century authoritarian state violence and to articulate their support for anticolonial struggles for self-determination. In this era, left political thinkers developed novel theories of human rights as part of a socialist political imaginary and simultaneously produced compelling critiques of liberal and neoliberal accounts of human rights. The dissertation also assesses whether alternative formulations of human rights remain latent in legal instruments, social movement discourses, and institutional practices today.