The article tries first of all to show how the ambition to achieve a “direct democracy” should be considered as a purely “modern” theoretical-political project: the idea of a ‘direct’ exercise of power by the people is placed in a specifically modern vision of power, completely different from that of the model of the so-called “democracy of the ancients”. Secondly, the text distinguishes between a vigilant conception of direct democracy and a constituent (and at the same time destituent) conception: according to the first, the ‘direct’ exercise of decision-making power by the people is aimed at ‘supervising’ the political class and to prevent the representative bodies from becoming independent of the people’s requests; for the second, direct democracy must instead dissolve those institutional filters that prevent citizens from exercising full power over society and its articulations. Finally, the paper focuses on the ‘enemies’ of the modern project of direct democracy and on the paradoxes that constantly recur in the various reformulations of the direct democracy.