Benjamin I. Schwartz

Presidential Address: Area Studies as a Critical Discipline

As we all know, the modest, colorless, and ambiguous term “area studies” emerged during the course of World War II as a way of describing one minor enterprise in the war effort. It was an enterprise designed to achieve an encapsulated understanding of the unknown areas of the world in which we suddenly found ourselves engaged. During and after the war, most area studies were contemporary in orientation and, given the circumstances of their origin, extremely vulnerable to the charge of serving “nonscholarly” political or military interests.

In Search of Wealth and Power; Yen Fu and the West.

In a serious effort to divine the secret of the Wests success in achieving wealth and power, Yen Fu, a Chinese thinker, undertook, at the turn of the century, years of laborious translation and commentary on the work of such thinkers as Spencer, Huxley, Adam Smith, Mill, and Montesquieu. In addition to the inevitable difficulties involved in translating modern English into classical Chinese, Yen Fu was faced with the formidable problem of interpreting and making palatable many Western ideas which were to a large extent antithetical to traditional Chinese thought.In an absorbing study of Yen Fus translations, essays, and commentaries, Benjamin Schwartz examines the modifications and consequent revaluation of these familiar works as they were presented to their new audience, and analyzes the impact of this Western thought on the Chinese culture of the time. Drawing on a unique knowledge of both intellectual traditions, Schwartz describes the diverse and complex effects of this confrontation of Eastern and Western philosophies and provides a new vantage point to assess and appreciate these two disparate worlds.