ABSTRACT
Democracy is a highly contested concept in both political theory and practice. Sovereignty is the traditional name given by philosophy to the ultimate source of authority in a state, hence the basis for all compulsion to obey. Derrida undertakes a questioning of the concepts that the people use to understand democracy, aiming to find or recover something against which they might measure not just the adequacy of their current democratic political systems, but the concepts by which we already criticise and understand democracy. This sounds very much like a form of critique in the sense first given to it by Immanuel Kant, and which still underpins the idea of a critical philosophy in general: an enquiry into the conditions of possibility of democracy, which allows us to define an ideal democracy towards which they might orient their own political activities.
