ABSTRACT
The issue of "human rights" became a focus for a major foreign policy debate in a Western democracy occurred a little more than a century ago in Britain, when Gladstone divided the country because of the massacre of some 12,000 Bulgarians by their Turkish rulers. The most discussions of "human rights" are misleading because beneath the surface there is almost always a hidden agenda. An issue of "human rights" is all too likely to be an issue exploited in bad faith. Traditional liberalism spoke not of "human rights" but of individual rights, these being almost exclusively rights vis-a-vis government. It explicitly recognized only one "social or economic right": the right to property, including the "property" of one's labor power. Political liberties exist only in societies that respect individual rights, including property rights. The effect of the "hidden agenda" was to help delegitimate the market economy ("capitalism") that is an indispensable precondition of a traditional liberal society.
