Sociology Reading Precis

SOCY105A: HOW TO WRITE A PRÉCIS

This quarter, you will write four précis (pronounced “pray-see” in both its singular and plural forms). The goal of a précis is to faithfully reproduce the arguments of an original document while reducing its length to about 1/6 the length of the original. For each assignment, you’ll be producing précis of about two pages (approximately 450-600 words).

Prepare to write your précis:

1. Read the selection carefully. 

2. While reading, note the main argument and any supporting material you come across. It can be helpful to underline or highlight important points, or to make notes in a separate notebook.

3. You will need to read the selection multiple times. Try to see new things in every reading.

Write the précis:

1. Begin to work through the text, condensing the material you have read without leaving out any part of the argument. A helpful approach is to start by organizing and underlining the topic sentences in each paragraph throughout the document. Depending on the theorist, it can also be helpful to check the introduction and conclusion to each section or each long paragraph. These will often provide most of your précis’s skeleton.

2. If there are any key terms used by the author of the text, make sure that they are mentioned and indirectly defined within your précis.

3. Write as if you were the author. Do not write, “In this piece, Marx says ____.” In a précis, you actually trying to be Marx, except that you are translating him in such a way that even your non-Sociology friends can understand the text.

A précis, strictly speaking, does not include your own opinions about the work.  Instead, it succinctly encapsulates (a) the theoretical content of the work, (b) the research that went into the work (if applicable), (c) the conclusions of the work, and (d) what about the work is important. 

Remember:

· This is not a reflection paper or book report – it’s an exact replica of the original, but shorter, and in different words. Think of it as a translation from “more complicated” to “more basic.”

· Try not to quote the text, and limit paraphrasing unless absolutely necessary (that is, unless there’s no other way to say it).

· Don’t add any opinion or new examples.

· Don’t use expressions like, “This passage says…” You don’t want to “stand apart” from the document, but rather, to reproduce its intent, tone, style and mood in different words.

· DO NOT move past the sentence you are working with until you fully understand it, no matter how much background research you have to do in order to understand it.

· Don’t be attached to a sentence once you have written it. Going back to change, re-edit, adjust, add, remove, etc. is part of writing a good précis.

· Practice to simply ignoring/tossing out any text that doesn’t add to your point.

· All work must be edited for grammar, punctuation, spelling, etc., just as you would a formal paper.

SAMPLE PRÉCIS – Marx (in Calhoun)

Start point: middle of pg. 147 (“The worker become all the poorer…)

End point: top of pg. 154 (“…various hitherto unsolved conflicts)

The value of a worker is inversely proportional to the value of the goods that he produces. The worker makes commodities, and is himself a commodity. When a worker’s labor is used to make something, the labor becomes an object that is alienated from the worker. Estranged labor decreases the worker’s value while increasing his dependence on capital. The worker is alienated from the product of his labor, and the product of the worker’s labor diminishes him.

Nature provides the worker with both his means of subsistence and the raw materials he needs to turn his labor into a product. When the worker uses materials from the external world, he objectifies it and compromises his own subsistence. The worker cannot physically sustain himself without the money he earns through work; these earnings further ensure that he will continue to exist physically as a worker. The value of a worker is inversely proportional to the value of the goods that he produces.

Political economy hides the estranged relationship between the worker and production. Labor creates useful goods for those who can consume them while harming those who make them. The most important relationship for us to consider is that of the worker to production. The worker is not only alienated from the product of his labor, but from the process of production. While he is working, the worker must constantly deny his physical and mental preferences. We can tell that labor is coerced because the worker does not participate in it unless he has to in order to satisfy a need. When a worker labors for someone else, he belongs to that person rather than to himself. The worker then feels free only in performing animal functions such as eating, sleeping, and procreating. If estrangement from the object of the worker’s labor is estrangement from a thing, then the worker’s estrangement from the process of laboring is estrangement from himself.

A third form of estrangement is alienation from species-being. Man is a species-being because he understands himself to be a member of a species. Physically, man lives on the products of nature. Estranged labor separates the life of the species from man’s individual life. The activities at which man labors to maintain his physical existence are not estranged. The life-maintaining activities of man and the life-maintaining activities of animal are distinct because man is conscious of these activities as separate from himself. Estranged labor causes alienation by turning this conscious activity into a mere means for existence. Animals produce only to meet an immediate physical need; man produces beyond immediate need. Man is conscious of the existence of species beyond his own. Man can also create objects of beauty. When man is deprived of the object of his production, he is also deprived of his species-life. If nature is taken away from him, he has no advantage over animals: his spontaneous free activity becomes merely a means for survival.

When men are estranged from their own species-nature, they are also estranged from other men. The products and the labor from which men are alienated must belong to other men. Like the product of labor and the process of laboring, these other men are also alien and hostile to the worker. It seems like private property creates alienated labor, but it is actually alienated labor that creates private property through the estrangement of man from other men.

Manifesto of the Communist Party

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class

struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf,

guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed,

stood in constant opposition to one another, carried

on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that

each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society

at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a

complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold

gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians,

knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal

lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in

almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.

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

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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 semi-feudal 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

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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 bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary

part.

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put

an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly

torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to

his “natural superiors”, and has left no other nexus between

man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”.

It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstasies of religious

fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism,

in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved

personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the

numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that

single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for

exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has

substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation

hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has

converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the

man of science, into its paid wage laborers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental

veil, and has reduced the family relation into a mere money

relation.

The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the

brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries

so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful

indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity

can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing

Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals;

it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former

exoduses of nations and crusades.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing

the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of

production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation

of the old modes of production in unaltered form,

was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all

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earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production,

uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting

uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois

epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with

their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions,

are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before

they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is

holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with

sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his

kind.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products

chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It

must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections

everywhere.

The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world

market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption

in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionaries,

it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national

ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries

have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They

are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a

life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries

that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material

drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose

products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter

of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production

of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction

the products of distant lands and climes. In place of

the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we

have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence

of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production.

The intellectual creations of individual nations become

common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness

become more and more impossible, and from the numerous

national and local literatures, there arises a world

literature.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments

of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication,

draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization.

The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy

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artillery, with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with

which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of

foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction,

to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels

them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e.,

to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a

world after its own image.

The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the

towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased

the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus

rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy

of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the

towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries

dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations

of bourgeois, the East on the West.

The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the

scattered state of the population, of the means of production,

and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralized

the means of production, and has concentrated property in a

few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political

centralization. Independent, or but loosely connected

provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems

of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with

one government, one code of laws, one national class interest,

one frontier, and one customs tariff.

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years,

has created more massive and more colossal productive forces

than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of

nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to

industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric

telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization

or rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground

— what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive

forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?

We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on

whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated

in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of

these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under

which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal

organization of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one

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word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible

with the already developed productive forces; they became

so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were

burst asunder.