  Schmitt admits that the principle of democracy is the only principle of legitimacy that is available as an ideological basis for a contemporary constitution (PT 50–2; CPD 22–32). If Schmitt’s conception of sovereignty is to be defensible, it must therefore be given a democratic interpretation. But it is difficult to see how this could be possible. The only candidate for sovereignty in a democratic polity is the popular sovereign, composed of politically equal citizens. A popular sovereign, it seems, cannot be a Schmittian sovereign, as it will only be able to decide under existing constitutional rules that determine how the people as a collective are to form a unified will.  Schmitt prepared the groundwork for a solution to this problem in Dictatorship, his historical study of the development of the institution of dictatorship (McCormick 1997, 121–56; Cristi 1998 108–25; Kalyvas 2008, 88–126; Kelly 2016).