Business and Human Rights (BHR) scholarship has long recognized the exercise of corporate power as resembling functional sovereignty, advocating for the extension of the rule of law to private actors, establishing accountability regimes, and providing remedies for victims. With the proliferation of binding BHR instruments, such as human rights due diligence legislation, the BHR project finds itself at a critical juncture, where calls for hard obligations are no longer sufficient. Our article, and the broader Symposium, seek to push the boundaries of the discourse by interrogating the legal foundations of private power. Drawing from Law and Political Economy scholarship, we challenge the prevailing notion of ‘governance gaps’ that often frames BHR debates. Rather, we argue that the legal infrastructure itself enables and facilitates the forms of exploitation and structural inequality embedded in the global political economy, leading to predictable patterns of human rights violations. By uncovering the institutional foundations of private power, we also show how efforts to leverage mechanisms of private governance, including human rights due diligence, risk naturalizing corporate power and limiting institutional imagination. However, a critique only focused on institutional design does not sufficiently account for the hardwiring of social relations of global production and the systemic constraints these impose on projects of legal reform. Acknowledging these limitations, we outline two modes of critique: an ‘internal’ critique, which seeks to reimagine institutional frameworks, and an ‘immanent’ critique, which emphasizes the role of collective action and social movements in transforming the underlying social relations of production.