Return to Max Weber. The relevance of Max Weber in the republicanism of José Luis Villacañas

Based on a close reading of his latest work, Max Weber in Context: Philosophy and Social Science Following in the Footsteps of Kant, this chapter explains that José Luis Villacañas’s original political thought was forged from his reflections and studies of Weber’s work. We will also see that for Villacañas, Weber’s enterprise is complementary to his reception of Kantian political philosophy, the best expression of which is Res publica: The Normative Foundations of Politics. Finally, we will explain that Villacañas uses Weberian categories, particularly those related to the separation of spheres, to criticize the great adversary of republican theory, the thought of political theology, as can be seen in his book Imperial Political Theology and the Community of Christian Salvation: A Genealogy of the Separation of Powers.