Philosophy as a collaborative work

Through the work in Dificultades con la Ilustración: Variaciones Sobre Temas Kantianos [Difficulties with the Enlightenment: Variations on Kantian Themes] (2013) and Populismo [Populism] (2015 ), I look at the Kantian and Hegelian influence in the work of José Luis Villacañas Berlanga. In the former text, Villacañas highlights the failures of the Enlightenment and modernity in order to understand the difficulties that those projects face when they deal with the real world. And in the later text, Villacañas gives an exposition of populism and its theorization to offer a critique in the name of civil republicanism to confront the erosion of society at the hands of neoliberalism and identitarian nationalism in which populism is entangled. According to Villacañas, we can ask: why does the Enlightenment generate its own difficulties and contradictions when it contends with the real world? And why is there a problem with the populist tendency towards the supposed affective immediacy of the people through which it constructs a hegemonic representation of the idiosyncratic demands of the people opposed to mediating state representation? Through the Kantian influence, Villacañas illustrates the failures of the Enlightenment as a supposed emancipatory mediation of the human spirit. And through the Hegelian influence, Villacañas understands the role of mediation in his republicanism in such a manner that reflects the standpoint of the Hegelian monarch as opposed to the immediacies of civil society and the idiosyncratic demands of the rabble.