Abstract
Honoris causa doktorates awarded by the Prague university over the 150 years can be addressed in the broad context of the significance of higher education for the national community within the modern-time European intellectual and cultural development. The university was one of the prominent venues for historical events and a dramatis persona of the rising national legitimacy of the civic concept in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Following major turbulence caused by political pressure and totalitarian deformations, it continues to contribute to the development of free research and education in the modern sense of academic freedoms, to the development of the creativeness of the human spirit, and to the cultivation of the civic society. The book strives to cover the use of the ancient ius promovendi by the university, both formally and from the perspective of prestige and representation, which was associated with symbolic explicitness.