Ervin Szabó

Who was Ervin Szabó?

Ervin Szabó was a Hungarian social scientist, librarian and anarcho-syndicalist revolutionary.

Born Samuel Armin Schlesinger, Szabó's parents were assimilationist Jews from Árva County. He studied law at the University of Vienna, where he completed his doctorate in 1899. and wrote for Népszava, a Social-democratic newspaper. In 1911, he became director of Budapest's Metropolitan Library. He modelled his library after the British public library system.

He advanced academically, becoming the vice-president of the Hungarian Association of Social Science in 1906.

After 1905, he began to move away from social democracy towards revolutionary syndicalism, and translated the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels into Hungarian. He wrote articles for socialist journals Die Neue Zeit and Le Mouvement socialiste. He became associates with Georges Sorel, Karl Kautsky, Franz Mehring, Georgi Plekhanov, and later, with Hubert Lagardelle. He became a leader of the Hungarian anti-war movement during the First World War.