ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the claims of communitarian political philosophy and in particular the work of Taylor and considers how such accounts could help construct a non-rationalist grounding for a commitment to refugee rights. It should, however, be stressed that ontological accounts of the individual's relationship to society are in principle distinct from moral and political theories of community. One consequence of defending a communitarian ontology will be a rejection of the universalist and cognitivist claims of procedural liberalism. There are a number of senses in which liberal universalism could be said to have the status as a higher order good in liberal cultures, depending on which type of liberal theory one embraces. The central conflict in western culture over the past two centuries has been between the goods associated with Enlightenment ideals of universal rights or duties of benevolence, and goods associated with the Romantic strand of western thought.
