In the modern world, the task of finding an optimal (or at least more or less acceptable) balance between individual and collective human rights is becoming increasingly relevant day by day, primarily, given the globalization processes in general and the powerful migration crisis, in particular. The purpose of the article is to make a philosophical, legal and general theoretical analysis of the nature of collective rights and their correlation with individual rights in the context of two dichotomies: nominalism and realism, on the one part, and liberalism and communitarianism, on the other part. The author notes that the understanding of the social nature of collective rights is a kind of “litmus test” allowing to label the original research, political and legal positions of a certain author by one of the delimitation lines which are determinant for the modern philosophy of law. On the one side of this line there are proponents of liberalism tenets and the varieties of philosophical legal nominalism which mostly correlate therewith, whereas on the other side there are the advocates of communitarianism ideas and, accordingly, the followers of realism in the philosophy of law. The said delimitation line is to some extent conditional. If we use the terminology of public international law, here we may refer only to delimitation rather than demarcation. Since, firstly, it is well-known that there are practically no “sterile-clean” liberals or Communists having no admixtures of other philosophical ideas, and this is also true in respect of nominalists or realists. Besides, it is not very often that human rights researchers openly announce their self-identification enunciating their original methodological orientations. Secondly, the above-mentioned philosophical thoughts – just like any other – contain a sort of interim options which, often not without some good reasons, may claim or even de facto claim to be a certain “golden mean” between the political and legal and (or) epistemological extremes (let’s remember, respectively, “liberal communitarianism” and “conceptualism”). The author makes it evident that for each human rights researcher a certain position held with regard to the classical philosophical issue of universals determines (consciously or unconsciously, explicitly or implicitly) other ideological and methodological positions with regard to the most important issues of law. Since today the widely recognized fundamental collective rights include the right of different communities to protect their identity, one of the central topics for a further research is the issue of identity as one of the system-forming categories of collective rights. This aspect is of particular interest for the study of political legal and philosophical legal issues using the material of multicultural societies of the Western World, where immigration processes and the meeting of different cultures gives rise to a clash of two value systems: the Western one stemming from the concept of a human being as an individual, and the Eastern one which sees a human being primarily as a component of a larger family.