Assistant Professor at Eötvös Loránd University and Research Fellow at Institute of Political History (Budapest, Hungary)

A Transatlantic Central European on the Third Way: a register of Oscar Jászi’s (1875-1957) archival legacy at Butler Library (Columbia University) and survey of his intellectual impact on the New Deal debates

The project is to survey and catalogue the archival legacy of the Hungarian civic radical politician and theoretician Oscar Jászi (1875–1957), whose papers (including letters, diaries and manuscripts) are held in the Rare Books and Manuscript Collection at Butler Library, Columbia University (New York City). The primarily focus is on the unregistered, unknown correspondence which covers the American years (1925–1957) and activities of Jászi. The project aims the detailed description of the archival legacy: to summarize the contents of the documents and to set up a comprehensive index for the themes of the letters. Along with the detailed description of the archival legacy, a study (both in Hungarian and English) would be elaborated based on the American materials about the almost unknown “American Jászi”, who joint American intellectual and political debates around the New Deal in the 1930s.

Several studies were published about the intellectual roots of US Neoliberalism in the post-WWI Austria, but much less light shed on the other side of the coin: the impact that the Central European progressive immigrants had on the US politics in the New Deal era. These progressives – including Oscar Jászi – were politically educated in the Austro–Hungarian Monarchy when the idea of the “Aktive Stadt” and interventionist communal policy emerged along with the idea of decreasing social inequalities through state regulation of free market. Because among Jászi’s indentified pen friends were influential American intellectuals and politicians (e. g.  Fiorello La Guardia, Walter Lippmann), mapping of Jászi’s network would be a serious contribution not only to the Central European, but also to the American intellectual history.