This article offers a reading of Catherine Colliot-Thélène’s Le commun de la liberté (2022) as a major contribution to the renewal of the way of doing political philosophy characteristic of what may be called the “radical enlightenment”. It is claimed that the book forms part of the same politico-philosophical project as La démocratie sans “demos” (2011), i.e. the reconstitution of democracy on a new radical basis. Colliot-Thélène puts forward a bold defence of methodological individualism of rights as the key component of the grammar of democratic politics, at the same time that she considers the shortcomings of existing democratic systems from the standpoint of two symptomatic figures, the poor and the refugee. The second part of the contribution engages with three aspects which are at the core of Le commun de la liberté, namely the conception of property, the conception of citizenship and of personal statuses, and the theory of rights.