Hungarian contributions to world civilization

Előszó

Preface Since the conclusion of World War II, an entirely new era has begun in the life of mankind. This has made possible for the very first time and on truly global proportions the interchange of ideas, a powerful gateway to heretofore unthinkable progress. One may challenge the values of the political and socioeconomic phenomena of this historic epoch on various grounds. But the fact remains that its almost limitless worldwide communication has opened up completely new vistas for humanity as a whole and has altogether broadened our perspective on all branches of humán knowledge. In these epoch-making efforts I fírmly believe we ought to prepare a balance sheet of all nations in order to show their places in the evolution of the world's civilizations. In other words: let us put into historical perspective the intellectual contributions of all separate ethnic entities, without which effort no positive steps can be taken to achie ve interethnic (international) cooperation aiming at lasting peace and justice. To my knowledge, my present treatise is the very first experiment in this direction and it tries to determine the place of a nation in the universal history of humán civilizations. Owing to this, my treatise is necessarily of a pioneering nature with all of its virtues and deficiencies. One of my greatest shortcomings is that during the whole process of source and data collection as well as their evaluation and composition I have been compelled to be overselective for several different but understandable reasons. The first encouragement to publish this book came from U.S. Representative Frank Horton of New York who kindly inserted my preliminary study "Hungárián Contributions to American Culture" in the September 30, 1975 issue of the CongressionalRecord. In the course of my research I found such a wealth of material on the topic that I extended my research into a book. Vissza