This article critically considers Michael Burawoy’s ‘public sociology for human rights’ through the lens of Timothy W. Luke’s ‘rites of rule’. The author argues that, while admirable in its stated aim, public sociology for human rights neglects to reveal its roots in governmentality and thus does not recognize the empirical practice of human rights within cosmopolitan global governance as a shift to consolidated contragovernmentality. The author concludes that public sociology for human rights as it is currently framed stabilizes the practice of human rights as rites of rule in an attempt to stabilize knowledge and the relations that it orders.