In an age characterized by the tendency to the growing hybridization between democracies and authoritarian regimes (with the coining of the neologism «democratura»), and in which, due to the spread of a culture of emergency, we have also returned to revive the concept of «constitutional democracy» (object of some studies in the first half of the twentieth century), it is necessary to open up the debate about dictatorship within political theory. Starting from the distinction between «commission dictatorship» and «sovereign dictatorship» (the subject of a classic book by Carl Schmitt), the article is focused on some salient passages of dictatorship in ancient Rome, in the process of formation of the modern State, and in the political thought of the republican tradition, to conclude on the problematic aspects of the current revival of the concept
