This work brings together two series of essays (1989-2009) written by Etiénne Balibar: some, philosophical, about the enunciation and the institution of fundamental rights during the process of the struggles of emancipation of modernity; the others are interventions on the French political reality about events of global repercussion. Its meeting point is a problem of the antinomies of citizenship as an institution of the political that, due to its original relationship with democracy, is permanently forced to rethink the conditions of legitimacy and transformation that are proper to it. The compendium includes the reissue of the 1989 essay, The Proposition of Equality, whose formulations are associated with the "post-Marxist" point of view defended by the author in political philosophy, and culminates with an unpublished essay on "co-citizenship", in which applies to the movement of migrants the principles of a democracy without exclusions. Among them are inserted several critical essays (on Rancière, Esposito, Poulantzas, Arendt and Laclau) that sketch one of the most significant and current trends in the philosophy of democracy. This book has received a translation aid from the CNL, Center national du Livre, in Paris.