Group Summarizing Arguments

Presentation

Summarizing Arguments

This lesson will show you how to describe arguments that had a significant impact on human history.

Objectives

Students will:

• Summarize the argument in a historical document.

Skills Needed

Students must be able to:

• Identify the parts of an argument.
• Make inferences and draw conclusions.

Do Now:

Read the following paragraph and write a 1–2 sentence summary of the main argument. “Many schools are debating whether uniforms should be required. Proponents argue that uniforms reduce peer pressure and bullying by creating a sense of equality among students. Opponents claim that uniforms restrict self-expression and do not address the underlying social issues.”

What happened hEre?

What kinds of arguments outlive the people who wrote them?

Throughout history, arguments have been used to convince people to accept important new causes, ideas, concepts, and actions. When America's "founding fathers" gathered in the hot, crowded hall to draft the first U.S. Constitution, creating a country with new rules, what were they really doing? They weren't just drafting guidelines for building a nation--they were presenting arguments for the structure and character of their new country. What other famous arguments affected U.S. history? Use the images below as clues. Then click each image to learn more.

What happened hEre?

What kinds of arguments outlive the people who wrote them?

In each of these situations, a president proposes an idea, supports it with reasons and examples, and then asks the American people to stand with him in his position on the issue. Knowing how to summarize important arguments can give you a much deeper understanding of history. It can also help you understand how arguments you hear today might impact your future. Of course, summarizing is just the first step to understanding the impact of an argument, but it's a very important first step!

Meet Karl Marx

Who is considered the "father" of communism?

Karl Marx, who was born in Germany in 1818, was raised by parents with a strong interest in education and philosophy. Marx took those ideas to heart, and let his opinions about society--and its mistakes--be known. Marx's opinions were considered wrong and even dangerous by his own government. Therefore, Marx moved to France, hoping to find a little more intellectual freedom.

Marx expected that Paris would be swarming with revolutionaries of every kind. Everybody seemed to have an opinion about the kinds of philosophical ideas that interested Marx, and most were not afraid to shout it on the streets. Marx met many inspirational people, but it was his partnership with Friedrich Engels, a rich socialist, that changed the course of Marx's life. By the mid-1800s, Marx and Engels had developed a set of ideas they called Revolutionary Proletarian Socialism. These ideas are better known today as communism. In speeches and public debates, Marx and Engels argued passionately against the concepts of monarchy and rule by aristocracy until, finally, even France had had enough. In 1845, the French told Marx to take his revolutionary ideas elsewhere and forced him to leave the country. In Belgium, Marx and Engels met people who liked their radical ideas so much that they asked the two philosophers to write them all down. They encouraged Marx and Engels to state their beliefs, clarify their aims, polish their principles, and put them in print so that others could share them. The Communist Manifesto was published in early 1848, and for a moment, when revolution in Germany broke out, the text was hailed as an anthem. Germany's revolution was suppressed quickly, however, and Marx's group of followers parted ways while Marx moved on to England. Why Did Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels write The Communist Manifesto?

Class Matters

What was Karl Marx's argument?

In a general sense, a manifesto is written statement of one's beliefs and principles. Manifestos can be created by individuals or groups, but they are almost always created for the purpose of announcing what the writer considers to be a new or radical idea. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx makes is easy to figure out his main argument or thesis. He makes it the first sentence in the first chapter: The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. According to Marx and his followers, all of history results from the conflict between the social and economic classes. The purpose of the Manifesto is to show or prove that this opening statement is true. That makes this document an especially easy one to summarize and evaluate. Read the first few paragraphs of The Communist Manifesto, and think about ways you could summarize this section. *Watch video in textbook

from The Communist Manifesto

The Manifesto, Summarized

Who are these bourgeoisie and proletarians anyway?

In the next few paragraphs of his Manifesto, Marx introduces two key terms that appear throughout the text: Keep the meaning of these two words in mind as you read the next section.

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other—bourgeoisie and proletariat. From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed. The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonization of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development. The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolized by closed guilds, now no longer suffices for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed aside by the manufacturing middle class; division of labor between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labor in each single workshop. Meantime, the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacturers no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionized industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry; the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.

Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages. We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange. Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance in that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association of medieval commune: here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany); there taxable "third estate" of the monarchy (as in France); afterward, in the period of manufacturing proper, serving either the semifeudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies in general—the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative state, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

The Communist Manifesto

The Communist Manifesto

The Communist Manifesto

Another kind of oppression

What other writers created arguments that shaped history?

Another author-philosopher whose work influenced history was Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Gilman was born in 1860 in Connecticut. By the time she died in 1935, she had written many books, essays, short stories, and magazine articles, but her most famous work was a short story called "The Yellow Wallpaper," based on her own experience. After Gilman's daughter was born, she fell into a deep depression. As treatment, her doctors told her to go to bed--and stay there. This "rest cure," as it was called then, made Gilman so unhappy that she got a divorce and moved to California, where she continued to write. Although Gilman's father abandoned the family when she was still young, she was surrounded by strong women as she grew up. Her aunts included an educational reformer, a dedicated suffragist, and another writer--Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the best-selling novel about slavery, Uncle Tom's Cabin. By the time Gilman was an adult, she was independent, opinionated, and committed to reforming the way women were perceived in the late 19th century. Like Marx's Manifesto, Gilman's writing was meant to make people reexamine their lives and attitudes, and to take a hard look at the societies they had created. In addition to her famous short story, Gilman wrote many novels that tied into the ongoing fight for women's rights, including the right to vote. One book, titled The Man-Made World, or Our Androcentric Culture, identified what Gilman saw as obstacles to women's equality and argued against those obstacles. Her works helped inspire, motivate, and empower women for decades.

Grow Your Vocabulary

At the end of this lesson, you'll read a passage from one of Gilman's books--part of an essay titled "As to Humanness." Some words in the essay may be difficult for you to understand. Use the activities on this page to help you become familiar enough with these words to remember what they mean when you start reading the excerpt.

• dissentient
• didactic
• effeminate
• tacit

• androcentric
• delimited
• chivalrous
• abdicate

Try This

How might you summarize an argument that you want to discuss in a report?

Suppose you need to write a report about the history of the women's rights movement, and you want to talk about Gilman's influence on later writers and activists. The passage below, from the essay "As to Humanness," in Gilman's book The Man-Made World, or Our Androcentric Culture, would be important to include, since it represents one of the book's primary arguments. However, you don't have room in your report to include the entire passage! What you'll need to do instead is to summarize the argument and then explain why it's important to the history of women's rights. As you read the passage, think about what ideas you would include in your summary. Remember to keep what you know about Gilman in your mind as you read.

Our historic period is not very long. Real written history only goes back a few thousand years, beginning with the stone records of ancient Egypt. During this period we have had almost universally what is here called an Androcentric Culture. The history, such as it was, was made and written by men. The mental, the mechanical, the social development, was almost wholly theirs. We have, so far, lived and suffered and died in a manmade world. So general, so unbroken, has been this condition, that to mention it arouses no more remark than the statement of a natural law. We have taken it for granted, since the dawn of civilization, that "mankind" meant men-kind, and the world was theirs. Women we have sharply delimited. Women were a sex, "the sex," according to chivalrous toasts; they were set apart for special services peculiar to femininity. As one English scientist put it, in 1888, "Women are not only not the race—they are not even half the race, but a subspecies told off for reproduction only." This mental attitude toward women is even more clearly expressed by Mr. H. B. Marriot-Watson in his article on "The American Woman" in the "Nineteenth Century" for June, 1904, where he says: "Her constitutional restlessness has caused her to abdicate those functions which alone excuse or explain her existence." This is a peculiarly happy and condensed expression of the relative position of women during our androcentric culture. The man was accepted as the race type without one dissentient voice; and the woman—a strange, diverse creature, quite disharmonious in the accepted scheme of things—was excused and explained only as a female. She has needed volumes of such excuse and explanation; also, apparently, volumes of abuse and condemnation. In any library catalogue we may find books upon books about women: physiological, sentimental, didactic, religious—all manner of books about women, as such. Even today in the works of Marholm—poor young Weininger, Moebius, and others, we find the same perpetual

discussion of women—as such. This is a book about men—as such. It differentiates between the human nature and the sex nature. It will not go so far as to allege man's masculine traits to be all that excuse, or explain his existence: but it will point out what are masculine traits as distinct from human ones, and what has been the effect on our human life of the unbridled dominance of one sex. We can see at once, glaringly, what would have been the result of giving all human affairs into female hands. Such an extraordinary and deplorable situation would have "feminized" the world. We should have all become "effeminate." See how in our use of language the case is clearly shown. The adjectives and derivatives based on woman's distinctions are alien and derogatory when applied to human affairs; "effeminate"—too female, connotes contempt, but has no masculine analogue; whereas "emasculate"—not enough male, is a term of reproach, and has no feminine analogue. "Virile"—manly, we oppose to "puerile"—childish, and the very word "virtue" is derived from "vir"—a man. Even in the naming of other animals we have taken the male as the race type, and put on a special termination to indicate "his female," as in lion, lioness; leopard, leopardess; while all our human scheme of things rests on the same tacit assumption; man being held the human type; woman a sort of accompaniment and subordinate assistant, merely essential to the making of people. She has held always the place of a preposition in relation to man. She has been considered above him or below him, before him, behind him, beside him, a wholly relative existence—"Sydney's sister," "Pembroke's mother"—but never by any chance Sydney or Pembroke herself. Acting on this assumption, all human standards have been based on male characteristics, and when we wish to praise the work of a woman, we say she has "a masculine mind." It is no easy matter to deny or reverse a universal assumption. The human mind

has had a good many jolts since it began to think, but after each upheaval it settles down as peacefully as the vine-growers on Vesuvius, accepting the last lava crust as permanent ground. What we see immediately around us, what we are born into and grow up with, be it mental furniture or physical, we assume to be the order of nature.

The Man-Made World, or Our Androcentric Culture,

The Man-Made World, or Our Androcentric Culture,

The Man-Made World, or Our Androcentric Culture,

Homework

• Read the article "Life Isn't Fair — Deal With It"
• Identify the main argument of the article.
• List two supporting points the author uses.
• Write a summary paragraph (3–4 sentences) explaining the argument and supporting points.

Exit Ticket

Take the Summarizing Arguments Quiz!