" The article gathers perspectives concerning the contemporary democracy, itschallenges and possibilities , of four important tied authors, in its specifics, fromthe called critical theory. Ellen Wood, Jürgen Habermas, Boaventura de SousaSantos and Claus Offe are called for the task to elucidate the polysemic democracyconcept, to express the phenomenon crisis itself that searchs to nominate,therefore, the ideas of representation and participation, of the relations betweenthe politics and economics, or the relationship between the market and citizenship.The four authors above indicate the inextricable limits in making the representativeliberal model democratic and display distinct, complementary or exactlyantagonistic diagnostic and prognostics that we try to systemize. The announcedtheoretical matrices had allowed us the reconstruction of democracy models: theradical democracy of Wood in her hard censure of capitalism as the organizer ofmodern life in society; the procedural or deliberacionist democracy of Habermasthat sights to be the synthesis of the liberal and the republican models without thevices thereof; the participative democracy of Sousa Santos and its bets in a newsocial contract to rebuild the State; the remodelled liberal and representativedemocracy by Offe in the times of disorganized capitalism post-welfare. Thedebate around these proposals of democracy, finally, suggests tracks in the renegotiationof the democracy in post-national contexts."