Zoltán Magyary and comparative political science

Abstract

The Study is a tribute to Zoltán Magyary, the founder and outstanding scholar of public administration in Hungary. It briefly describes and praises the career and work of the Professor, who committed suicide in 1945, and emphasises that his personal ambitions, his thirst for knowledge, his discipline, his dedication, his talent, his excellent memory, the personality traits that made him a star of Hungarian public administration, would have brought him to the top even in less tragic times. The pressures of reform on the Hungarian administration would have been very different in a country that had not been torn apart, or not completely torn apart, by Trianon, and whose resources, population and culture might have been very different. By analysing some elements of Magyary's "American State Life", a comparative state-scientific analysis of the constitutional system and public administration of the United States of America, the article demonstrates that Professor Magyary brought Hungarian public administration to the forefront of European and even world scholarship at the time.