His hometown was, as he put it in his unfinished memoirs, "the county seat of Szatmár, the center of a rich agricultural area, it was a major factor in Hungary's economic, municipal and political life.

"[3] Having done very well academically, he graduated a year early at seventeen, in 1892, and studied political science at the University of Budapest under Ágost Pulszky; he was also strongly influenced by Gyula Pikler, though he would later reject the latter's "doctrinaire, anti-historical positivism.

"[4] At this point he admired figures like József Eötvös and Pál Gyulai, thus aligning himself with "the principled European strand of Hungarian liberalism that stood against clericalism and the blustering nationalism of those who sought independence from Austria.

Jászi then entered the Department of Economics in the Ministry of Agriculture as a drafting clerk, remaining there for a decade; he received little pay at first but had a great deal of free time.

Within six weeks World War I broke out; "the new party supported the pacifist movement and called for the founding of a federation of states for the whole of Europe, a kind of forerunner of the League of Nations.

[12] Jászi resigned from the Károlyi government in December 1918, believing that no serious progress in the nationalities question would be possible owing to the arbitrary partitioning of Hungary by the victorious Entente powers.

[14] After the Hungarian unilateral self-disarmament, Czech, Serbian, and Romanian political leaders chose to attack Hungary instead of holding democratic plebiscites concerning the disputed areas.

[17] He went to the United States in 1925 and joined the faculty of Oberlin College, where he settled down to a career as a history professor and wrote a series of books, the best known of which is The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy, first published by the University of Chicago Press in 1929.