Hungarian Studies Review Spring-Fall, 1991 [antikvár]

Preface Oscar Jaszi, to Hungarians known as Oszkár Jászi, was the leading figure in turn-of-the century Hungary's bourgeois radical movement. He was born on March 2, 1875, in the city of Nagykároly (today's Satu Mare, in northeastern Rumania). His father was a Jewish doctor who had converted to the Reformed faith and who instilled in his son a love for learning and a sympathy for the common people. Jaszi completed his higher education in Hungary, France and England, and by 1911 he was teaching as a lecturer in constitutional studies at the University of Kolozsvár (today's Cluj, in Rumania). By this time he had also become prominent in Hungary's non-Marxist radical reform movement. He was one of the founders and sustainers of the Társadalomtudományi Társaság (Sociological Society) and became the editor of the reformist periodical, Huszadik Század (Twentieth Century). He also published numerous pamphlets and some longer studies on subjects relating to sociology, politics and what nowadays is known as "ethnic studies." Still later he was elected president of the National Radical Party. In the short-lived postwar revolutionary government of Mihály Károlyi, Jaszi was the minister in charge of nationality affairs, and shouldered the difficult task of negotiating with Hungary's national minorities at a time when the country, indeed the whole of the Austro-Hungarian Dual-Monarchy, was disintegrating. Jaszi was unable to stop this process of disintegration. He resigned from his post and, several weeks after the collapse of the Károlyi regime, left Hungary to begin his long exile, the first leg of which took him to Vienna. Here, he worked feverishly to organize the democratic elements of the Hungarian emigration. For some time he edited the Bécsi Magyar Újság (Hungarian Newspaper of Vienna). He tried to establish contacts with the leaders of the Successor States (Hungary's new neighbours), in preparation for a possible takeover by democratic forces in Hungary and a subsequent rapprochement between that country and its neighbours. When it became evident that the leaders of the Successor States were not interested 5