[4] He started a career in school teaching before studying Japanese in the United States Army during the Second World War and working on code-breaking.
[6] The Introduction says he will investigate the movement's “ideas, intentions, and ambitions” over a "limited period,” from 1918 to 1933, and only “in terms of its doctrinal frame of reference and of its internal political relations,” not “the ‘objective’ social and political conditions which have encouraged its growth or in terms of its effect on the masses.” [7] The Communists came to power “on the crest of a popular movement” but this did not mean that they were the “mystic embodiment of the popular will.” Future decisions “will be made by the political leaders and not by the surging masses.” [8] To say that leaders would automatically continue to express the needs and aspirations of the masses would be to “construct a myth designed to sanction in advance all their future activities.” [9] His second monograph, In Search of Wealth and Power, turned to the relations between tradition, modernity, and identity seen in the work of Yan Fu (1854-1921), best known as the translator and interpreter of John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin, and Herbert Spencer.
Earlier scholars had not thought Yan of interest, assuming that he had simply misunderstood these influential thinkers and their late 19th-century liberalism and individualism.
But Schwartz used the choices that Yan Fu made in his translations to reflect on the ways in which the pursuit of wealth and power in the West had subverted individual values, even within its own liberal tradition.
His 1985 book The World of Thought in Ancient China was published by Harvard University Press, and is held in 850 libraries, according to WorldCat.