The Hungarian Tocqueville

Recommendable! Hungary is a special European country even during the communist era.

I have to admit, Sándor Bölöni Farkas was not familiar to me.

"In September 1831, inside the brick walls of the Massachusetts state prison at Charlestown, two European visitors—unknown to one another—paced the corridors, taking notes on the newest American experiments in penal reform. One was the young French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville; the other, a Transylvanian Unitarian nobleman named Sándor Bölöni Farkas. Both had crossed the Atlantic to study the democratic republic that fascinated—and unsettled—Europe’s old order. For a brief afternoon, their paths converged as they observed the silent prisoners and the curious system of American discipline. Neither could have known that each would soon write a book that would shape their nation’s understanding of liberty and influence generations to come. Tocqueville returned to France to compose Democracy in America. Farkas returned to Kolozsvár (Transylvania) to write Journey in North America—published a full year earlier, in 1834. ..."

The Hungarian Tocqueville – Anna Smith Lacey