‘ON LIBERTY’ IN HUNGARY, AT THE RIGHT TIME
MILL, John Stuart.
A szabadságról. Fordította és az előszót írta Kállay Béni.
Béni. Pest, Ráth Mór, 1867.
8vo, pp. [iv], lxiv, 184; occasional pencil underlining, but a very good, clean copy in the original publisher’s decorated cloth, panelled sides with white- and red-on blue bands gilt with floral motives and a central crimson panel lettered in gilt, flat spine lettered and decorated in gilt; joints cracked but holding, foot of spine a little worn; twentieth-century private ink stamp, cancelled, and ink ownership inscription on the title-page.
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A szabadságról. Fordította és az előszót írta Kállay Béni.
Extremely rare (1 copy worldwide) first Hungarian edition of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. This translation, published in Pest, came out as the Habsburg Emperor accepted the consequences of a twenty-years-long strife for autonomy and rights on the part of Hungarian subjects. Mill’s anti-paternalistic view of liberty, which claimed a threefold understanding of the concept (the “inward domain of consciousness,” liberty of tastes and pursuits, and the freedom to unite with others) would have rung clear that year on the occasion, in the same year 1867, of The Austro-Hungarian Compromise, or Composition, which partially re-established the sovereignty of the Kingdom of Hungary, separate from, and no longer subject to, the Austrian Empire.
The only copy listed by OCLC is in the Lucian Blaga Central University Library, Cluj-Napoca, Romania.
