I attended primary and secondary school in Budapest and I studied at the faculty of arts  at University of Leipzig,  Frankfurt am Main and Zurich (after Hitler came into power).  My PhD degree was taken in philosophy and psycho-patology at University of Zurich, in 1934.  I worked as a researcher of psychology at the clinic of Zurich in 1934-35; I returned to Hungary at the end of 1935. I worked as the lector of Rózsavölgyi Book Publisher and the editor of the daily paper Pester Lloyd between 1935-39; then, from 1939 to 1944 I was the literary and scientific leader of Dante Könyvkiadó (Dante Book Publisher). 

Right after the final exam in secondary school  I joined the Social Democratic Party in 1930; from 1936  I worked as the external staff member of Népszava.  

I was called to take part in labour service more times during the war; then I was taken to take part in forced labour in Bor, Yugoslavia, I was set free there. 

From October 1944 to January 1945 I worked as an interpreter, being employed at one of the units of the Soviet  Army which came to set Hungary free, so I could come home.   

From 1945 to 1948, I worked at the Central Committee of the Social Democratic Party as the leader of the department of press and intellectuals. Later, I had other job in the party until  I was arrested in 1950. 

In 1964  I was invited to teach at Massachusetts Institute of Technology  (Cambridge, Mass. U.S.A) as visiting professor. 

After coming back, I was the senior research fellow of University Library at Karl Marx University of Economic Science; besides, I worked for the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. 

1966-1972:  I worked for the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR)  in New York as deputy director.  After I left that position, I remained Special Adviser on Studies within the organization of the institute.  

I am the member of the Council of the International Association of Sociology.  

I received the  Order of Merit of Work twice within 3 years (in 1970 and 1972). 

More than 100 scientific works were published  in Hungarian and in foreign languages within the period of some decades of my work.  

I am quite good at Russian, English, French and German languages; I can understand Italian as well.


Sándor Szalai in Magyar Életrajzi lexikon (Lexicon of Hungarian Biographies)

Szalai, Alexander:  Response to Kosa. In: The American Sociologist, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Aug., 1968), p. 247.

..."As for my academic qualifications, I obtained my first Ph. D. at the University of Zürich (Switzerland) in 1934; a second doctorate in philosophical sciences later in Budapest. I have been a full professor of sociology al two Hungarian universities (Budapest and  Veszprem  and have  been  invited at  various times  as a visiting professor to the University of Münster, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the New School for Social Research (New York), where I am at present a member of the visiting faculty of the Graduate School.
I have been pince 1967 Deputy Director of Research at the United Nations Institute for Training and Research in New York. I am on the Council of the International Sociological Association. and I am serving on two of ite research eoramittees. I chaired one of the roundtables of the last World Congress of Sociology (Evian, 1967). I am Dírector of the Multi-national Comparative Time Budget Research Project of the European Coordination Centre for Research and Documentution in the Social Sciences, an organ of the International Social Science Council.
The list of my scholarly publications contains well over a hundred items, very few of them "political" in any sense, most of them concerned with the sociology of science, industrial sociology, social psychology, methodological problems of cross-national comparative social research, and the applications of mathematical method in the social sciences...”