  Sovereign dictatorship, in Schmitt’s view, is an eminently democratic institution. It can exist only where it has become possible to take a sovereign decision on the exception in the name of the people. Sovereignty, Schmitt concludes, is not just compatible with democracy but central to it, as it is exercised whenever and wherever a democratic constitution is founded (CT 109–10, 265–6; CPD 32). The fact that a democratic constitution cannot endow a particular person with permanent sovereign authority does not entail that the possibility of a genuine sovereign decision on the exception has disappeared. It merely implies that a decision on the exception in the democratic state must take the form of an exercise of the people’s constituent power.