The paper analyzes the implementation of the “Bologna reform” of higher education in the Republic of Serbia during the last fifteen years. Emphasizing neoliberalism as the ideological basis of the reform, the authors subjected the reform to a critical analysis of its normative goals and achieved achievements. The authors conclude that the restructuring of universities based on market principles and their transformation into for-profit organizations leads to the gradual collapse of the basic function of a modern university embodied in the (...) search for truth and the production of knowledge. Contrary to the proclaimed “knowledge society”, the reform led to the lowering of scientific and educational standards and the neglect of immediately inapplicable knowledge, which completely changed the social evaluation of knowledge and science and resulted in the establishment of a “society of ignorance”. (shrink)

Although he primarily remained acknowledged as an authoritative theoretician of capitalism and one of the ‘founding fathers’ of sociology as a scientific discipline in Germany, Werner Sombart dedicated a significant amount of attention to the critique of modern culture that coincided with his withdrawal from the active participation in political life during the beginning of the twentieth century. After he failed to motivate German social democracy to carry out a social reform, and following a very negative impression he got in (...) the encounter with modern industrial society while visiting the United States of America, Sombart criticised capitalism, parliamentary-democratic system and mass culture from the standpoint of ‘cultural pessimism’. In the journal Der Morgen: Wochenschrift für deutsche Kultur, and in some other papers, sharply but fruitfully Sombart criticised industrial mass culture. In it, he saw a direct reflection of spiritual poverty and general decadence of the capitalistic society. (shrink)