Ervin Szabo

Ervin Szabo (23 August 1877 – 29 September 1918) was a Hungarian social scientist, librarian and anarcho-syndicalist revolutionary.

Born Samuel Armin Schlesinger, Szabo's parents were assimilationist Jews from Arva County. He studied law at the University of Vienna, where he completed his doctorate in 1899. and wrote for Nepszava, a Social-democratic newspaper. In 1911, he became director of Budapest's Metropolitan Library (which now bears his name). He modelled his library after the British public library system.

He advanced academically, becoming the vice-president of the Hungarian Association of Social Science (Tarsadalomtudomanyi Tarsasag) in 1906.

After 1905, he began to move away from social democracy towards revolutionary syndicalism, and translated the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels into Hungarian. He wrote articles for socialist journals Die Neue Zeit and Le Mouvement socialiste. He became associates with Georges Sorel, Karl Kautsky, Franz Mehring, Georgi Plekhanov, and later, with Hubert Lagardelle. He became a leader of the Hungarian anti-war movement during the First World War.