Philosophy and University Studies. In Universities and Leadership, No. 16, 2023, pp. 189-198.

The article is a translation of a speech delivered by Max Horkheimer at the University of Frankfurt in 1948. The author reflects on the role of the university in the postwar era, when young people regard any ideologies with distrust. The disillusionment of bourgeois society with the religious worldview and the abandonment of the glorification of the individual in favor of the collective Whole are named as the key causes of the decline of European humanism and, as a consequence, the Nazis’ rise to power. It is stressed that pessimism, radical individualism, and nostalgia for prewar cultural ideals do not solve the problem of finding new value orientations. In the author’s view, the instrument for countering the cynicism and conformism of mass society should be a critical consciousness directed at current social and political problems. He sees the university, despite the tendency toward the mechanization of education, as the place where it can be cultivated.