Benjamin Isadore Schwartz
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Schwartz, Benjamin Isadore
sex: m; b. Dec 21, 1916 in East Boston, Massachusetts, USA – d. Nov 15, 1999 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA; country/nation/culture: US-American; field of study: history of civilizations, history of ideas, history of political thought; ref.: none; contrib.: Don J. Wyatt
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[edit] Main Works
- Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao, 1951
- In Search of Wealth and Power. Yen Fu and the West, 1964
- Communism and China. Ideology in Flux, 1968
- The World of Thought in ancient China, 1985
- China and Other Matters (1996)
[edit] Biography
The son of German Jewish immigrants, Benjamin Schwartz was educated at Boston Latin School and Harvard College. Schwartz graduated from Harvard, magna cum laude, with a degree in Romance Languages and Literatures, in June 1938. He anticipated a career for himself as a high school teacher, and thus subsequently took his master's degree in education at Harvard in 1940. Schwartz had actually commenced secondary school teaching when, in early 1942, after the entrance of the United States into the Second World War, he enlisted in the United States Army, where he served in the intelligence branch of the signal corps, performing cryptanalysis in breaking Japanese communications codes. During the immediate postwar occupation of Japan, Schwartz was stationed in Osaka, where he served as a newspaper censorship officer (a role ironically at odds with his later calling). He was discharged in 1946 with the rank of captain. Returning to Harvard, Schwartz took a second master's degree in the newly inaugurated Regional Studies program in 1948; he subsequently took the doctorate in the new program of History and Far Eastern Languages in 1950. In that same year, his teaching career resumed at the university level as an instructor in history, government, and in the Harvard's Russian Research Center. Schwartz was jointly appointed to the departments of history and government in 1955 and became a tenured full professor in those departments in 1960. In 1974-75, he held the visiting Eastman Professorship at Balliol College, University of Oxford. From 1975 until his retirement in 1987, Schwartz was Leroy B. Williams Professor of History and Political Science.
[edit] Characterization
Like Joseph Levenson, his Harvard graduate school classmate, Benjamin Schwartz was irreversibly affected by and drawn to the study of things Asian by having lived in East Asia as a member of the armed forces. This impassioning experience motivated him to pursue East Asian studies generally and Chinese studies particularly as a vocation. Moreover, his daily exposure to the precariousness of life in the tumultuous East Asian theater during the war years prompted him to expand what were initially fairly circumscribed linguistic interests such that they grew to incorporate the investigation of history, politics, and culture.
One factor compelling Schwartz to redirect his scholarly focus away from Japan toward China would also reorient many others. His preliminary study quickly led him to regard China as the historical wellspring of culture for the entire East Asian region, the fount from which all the major surrounding cultures were derived and by which they were inescapably influenced. However, Schwartz had at least two additional reasons for concentrating on China at the expense of Japan. Upon returning to Harvard following the war, with an eagerness to legitimate his newfound interest in East Asia through the pursuit of graduate studies, Schwartz came under the influence of his primary mentor, John King Fairbank, professor and director of the Regional Studies Program on China and Peripheral Areas, established in 1946. Schwartz' fascination with the celebrated traditions of what was then vaguely and variously termed Oriental and Far Eastern thought was yet another reason for his interest primarily but never exclusively in China, where matters of intellectualism are generally agreed to have achieved their highest state of development.
From the start, Schwartz' investigations predominantly constituted informed inquiries into China's modern history and were chiefly focused on historical developments during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially the installation of communism in China. However, so wide-ranging were Schwartz' interests within the historical enterprise that he neither could nor would confine his research to the modern period. To be sure, an indispensable theme coursing throughout most of his scholarly production always remained the usually discomforting reception of Western ideas by the late traditional and modern Chinese intelligentsia. Yet, any perusal of the bibliography of his major works reveals that, in general, the more Schwartz advanced intellectually, the more he tended to select subjects of inquiry from further back in history. The temporal span between the subject of his first book on the Russian roots of Chinese Marxism and his last on the sources of classical Chinese thought is, at its extremes, nearly some four millennia. The temporal locus of his first major work is little more than the first half of the twentieth century of the common era. But that of his last, excluding a final collection of earlier essays from the 1960s into the 1990s, is some twenty centuries before the beginning of the common era. The sheer cultural immensity of China and its dauntingly vast history have contributed to restricting the expertise of many a historian—intellectual or otherwise. But Schwartz at all times resisted consignment to a limited range of viable topics or to narrow specialization within a particular time period. The result was his eventual maturation into a scholar of astonishingly commanding breadth.
[edit] Method
Thoroughly explicating the method of Benjamin Schwartz is important because, even while it was particular to the man himself, it nonetheless, in many ways, has come to epitomize the conventional approach to the study of Chinese intellectual history, at least as it is practiced in the American academy. Schwartz' method was first and foremost comparativist. He shared this approach in common with numerous others in the field of Chinese intellectual history, his contemporary Joseph Levenson among them. However, there were at least a few signature characteristics of his style of approach that gave rise to what might be called a distinctively "Schwartzian" method.
In his preeminently comparativist approach, Schwartz was hardly more a historicist than he was a structuralist. When examining any societies or polities comparatively, delineating not only the dissimilar attributes but also the commensurate ones was perhaps most important to him. To this end, Schwartz was not averse to isolating for the purpose of comparison a selective set of ideas, concepts, or constants that he deemed to be prevalent or at least in evidence in any two distinct cultural entities or, at times, throughout all cultural entities. Surely one representative example of this methodology at work is his article "The Age of Transcendence" (1975; Wisdom, Revelation, and Doubt: Perspectives on the First Millennium B.C., Daedalus).
Many of Schwartz' contemporaries had arrived at their study of the Chinese and Japanese languages primarily because of their preexistent interests in the histories of those regions. Schwartz, however, had become drawn to historical study expressly through the channel of language, and he never lost faith in the utility of language for historical inquiry. Maintaining an abiding investment in the capability of language for cultural definition and explanation, Schwartz believed that inasmuch as we are capable of historical consciousness, we express that consciousness, just as we do all other facets of awareness, through language. Thus, being more than a mere tool of communication, for Schwartz, China's "languages," or, more properly, its forms of discourse, whether philosophical, political, or bureaucratic, very much comprised the medium in and through which the culture's history emanated. Schwartz believed the discernment of the embedded messages in these forms of discourse to be fundamental to our historical understanding; thereby, historical discourse took precedence over historical acts and events.
Finally, with respect to method, we can observe that Schwartz fully appreciated, and even delighted in and embraced, historical ambiguity. His own words to this effect, extracted from his early essay "The Intellectual History of China: Preliminary Reflections" (1957; J. K. Fairbank, ed., Chinese Thought and Institutions) underscore this point. In arguing against the presumptive certainty of hindsight, having first noted that historical situations everywhere, when confronted existentially, are laden with ambiguity, thus rendering the appropriateness of a particular human response to be a matter of debate, Schwartz declares his opposition to the retrospective view as "necessarily closer to 'reality' than the perspective which attempts to capture the situation as it may have appeared in processu, in its unresolved state. From the point of view of intellectual history…, it is, in fact, the latter perspective which is the more 'real,' since it reflects the state in which men actually make their conscious responses" (17).
[edit] Impact
While living, the influence exerted by Benjamin Schwartz upon the ranks of American scholars of Chinese studies was substantial and, despite his passing, it nonetheless continues to linger. Indicative of this impact is the fact that Schwartz not only influenced historians in other sub-disciplines of the field than intellectual history but also a large coterie of scholars in nominally separate disciplines. His students included political scientists, philosophers, religionists, linguists, and scholars of literary history as well as historians. His gift to them was his unerring capacity to see the interconnectedness of all their endeavors.
[edit] External Links
- no article on Benjamin Isadore Schwartz in Wikipedia
