Abstract

“Anima Sola” (lonely soul) – this inscription can be read on the remains of Lajos Leopold Jr’s (1879–1948) tombstone in Cservolgy (at Totvazsony), a hamlet to the north of the Lake Balaton. Laszlo E. Bartfai who had acquired undying merit in the rediscovery of Leopold’s work wrote the following about him in 1987: “In Hungary his figure has been almost totally forgotten, together with his early work in sociology. The loss of memory is surely related to the fact that Hungarian sociology has always been primarily a movement and a discipline only in the second place.” He was an autonomous personality, he was in need for intellectual independence and he was in a peculiar social position. This means, that he was as a Jew (although later converted to Christianity) a prestigious member of the community led by the local gentry and intelligentsia. No doubt, all this, coupled with his daily life experiences drawn from his small home town kept him away from the mainstream of the fin de siecle Hungarian sociology that was increasingly becoming a political movement. His growing distance from the radical social science periodical entitled Huszadik Szazad [Twentieth Century] was already obvious by 1910. Leopold was born on 5 December 1879, in a big tenant family. Up to the early 1920s he lived in his place of birth, Szekszard, a small town of Tolna County known for its fertile soil and red wine, located in the southern part of Transdanubia. He spent the last five years of that period already in two residences, partly at home, and partly in the Hungarian capital, Budapest. In Szekszard, for some time he was a member of the board of directors of the local Credit Bank, linked to his family by many threads; and he was also a major cultivator on rented land at the nearby Ozsakpuszta. Towards the end of his period he was becoming an increasingly active member of the Agricultural Association of Tolna County. This situation may have inspired him for his early work on agricultural sociology in the 1900s, and to be active in the field of agricultural economy after World War I. He could be considered a sort of agrarian during the inter-war period, not only because of the scenes of his activity (the periodicals Koztelek [Public Plots], Gazdasors [Farmer’s Destiny] in Hungarian, Ignac Daranyi Society of Agricultural Science), but perhaps also of his identity. It was a long way to go from his youth linked to Twentieth Century and flirting anarchism to end up among conservative agrarians. It may appear to be long, but counting in decades it may not be

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