LESSON

This lesson illustrates the process we teach at BRAIN BOOK when working with college-level students who need to be able to read and understand complex material. The note-taking process is also helpful, because it allows main points to emerge from the details, and it allows those main points to be separated out for a "big picture" type of review later.

This specific reading and note-taking strategy combines:
writing Memory Notes for each paragraph, and
writing Summary Statements for each paragraph

RECOMMENDATION:
Read each Summary Statement written prior to reading each subsequent paragraphs.

The studying process is also integrated with writing Schedule and Memory Notes (we assume the person doing this "homework" assignment is either a high school or college-level student).

SUGGESTION:
Assume that you are a student who is expected to read this material with enough understanding to either participate in class the next day or answer a short quiz.

To actually do this exercise, the following steps are suggested:

1. Read this entire lesson description on your screen, clicking on the samples only to see what they look like, in a general way.
2. Print out this lesson description and the samples so you can use the hard copy version.
3. Start reading the lesson description from the beginning again, and SLOWLY go through it one piece at time WITH all your hard copies spread out in order on a table.

OK, now for the actual text, excerped from:

Contending Theories of International Relations:
A Comprehensive Survey
Second Edition
By James E. Doughterty and Robert L.Pfaltzgraff, Jr.
Published by Harper Row, New York;
Copyright 1981.

Most political scientists and other students of international relations realize that their subject areas are appallingly vast and complex. They are aware also that despite the many nostrums advertised for the world's ills, it is no less difficult to find a permanent solution for conflict and war than a cure for cancer. Understanding either the biological-psychological processes of the human being or the political processes of the international system – in such a way as to control them for rational ends – profoundly challenges humanity's intellect. Yet only through profound understanding can a theory for purposeful action arise. Throughout centuries, and with greater urgency certainly in modern times, people have tried to make sense of the shifting relationships of larger social groupings on the world scene. By surveying the theories that have been advanced, any reader – whether student, policymaker, journalist, or casual observer – may improve his or her understanding of international relations. This book, therefore, is designed to trace for the reader the development of international relations as a field of systematic study as well as to provide an understanding of the many themes that the field has produced.

Click here to see my Memory Notes for this first paragraph of text.

Click here to see my Summary Statements for this first paragraph of text.

EARLY APPROACHES TO
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS THEORY

Efforts at theorizing about the nature of interstate relations are quite old; some in fact go back to ancient times in India, China, and Greece. Although Plato's and Aristotle's reflections on the subject are quite sketchy, the ancient Greek historian Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War is a classic treatise any student of international relations can still read profitably. Machiavelli's The Prince, a harbinger of modern analysis of power and the state system, emphasized a "value-free" science of foreign policymaking and statecraft. Dante's De Monarchia became one of the first and most powerful appeals in Western political literature for an international organization capable of enforcing the peace. Other early proponents of a confederation or league of nation-states were Pierre Dubois (French lawyer and political pamphleteer of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries), Emeric Crucé (French monk of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries), the Duc de Sully (minister of France's Henry IV), William Penn, Abbé de Saint Pierre (French publicist and theoretical reformer of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries), Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jeremy Bentham, and Immanuel Kant.

Yet, despite these classical writings, no systematic development comparable to that in internal political theories of the state occurred in international theory before World War I. Martin Wight has noted that if by "international theory" we mean a "tradition of speculation about relations between states, a tradition imagined as the twin of speculation about the State to which the name 'political theory' is appropriated," it does not exist. Wight suggests that a reason for this situation is that since Grotius (1538-1645), the Dutch jurist and statesman, and Pufendorf (1632-1694), the German jurist and historian, nearly all speculation about the international community fell under the heading of international law. He notes that most writing on interstate relations before this century was contained in the political literature of the peace writers cited above, buried in the works of historians, cloistered in the peripheral reflections of philosophers, or harbored in speeches, dispatches, and memoirs of statesmen and diplomats. Wight concludes that in the classical political tradition "international theory, or what there is of it, is scattered, unsystematic, and mostly inaccessible to the layman," as well as being "largely repellent and intractable in form." The only theory which did infuse the thinking of the period – and it was a theory somewhat dearer to practicing diplomats than to academicians – was that of the balance of power. Indeed, it was a collection of what seemed to be common sense axioms rather than a rigorous theory.

The period of European history from 1648 too 1914 was the golden age of diplomacy, the balance of power, alliances, and international law. Nearly all political thought focused on the sovereign nation-state – the origins, functions, and limitations of governmental powers, the rights of individuals within the state, the requirements of order, the imperatives of national self-determination and independence. The economic order was presumed simplistically to be separate from the political. Governments were expected to promote and protect trade, but not to regulate it. Various branches of socialist thought sought to strike out in new directions, but socialists, despite their professed internationalism, did not really produce a coherent international theory. They advanced a theory of imperialism borrowed largely from John A. Hobson (1858-1940), the British economist, and thus derivative from an economic theory indigenous to the capitalist states. Until 1914, international theorists almost uniformly assumed that the structure of international society was unalterable, and that the division of the world into sovereign states was necessary and natural. The study of international relations consisted almost entirely of diplomatic history and international law, rather than of investigation into the processes of the international system.

MODERN APPROACHES TO
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS THEORY

Some impetus to the serious study of international relations in this country came when thee Untied States emerged as a world power. But ambiguities in American foreign policy, combined with the trend toward isolationism during the 1920s and 1930s, hindered the development of international relations as an intellectual discipline. A dichotomy developed between intellectual idealists, who shared Woodrow Wilson's vision of the League of Nations, and politicians who, feeling pressures for a "return to normalcy," blocked United States entry into the world organization. Americans demanded a moral and peaceful world order, but they were unwilling to pay the price. This dichotomy between noble impulses and tendencies toward isolationism was clearly reflected in the Kellogg-Briand Treaty of 1928, which "outlawed" war by moralistic declaration but provided no adequate means of enforcement.

As you read each paragraph, you would write fairly detailed Memory Notes. Remember, those of us with brain injury process bits and pieces sequentially now, so we need to give ourselves permission to write detailed notes as we read, giving ourselves time at the end of a workable "chunk" to summarize what we've read -- see it in a "big picture" sort of way.

As you get more practice, you will probably write less and less detail (remember, you don't want to re-write the text, verbatim). If you find you are tempted to do this, at LEAST paraphrase (put it into your own words).

Look at the following samples to see what I came up with for both:

1. detailed Memory Notes for each paragraph, and
2. Summary Statements for each paragraph

Keep in mind that after reading the first paragraph and writing the first Summary Statement, you will go on to read Paragraph #2 and write a second Summary Statement for Paragraph #2, as well.

Read all the Summary Notes you've written in order, before tackling the next paragraph.

I don't know exactly WHY this works, but it does. Whenever you read all the Summary Statements you've written, before tackling the next paragraph, things just start to make more sense. You see/feel the flow and the important points "stick."

Keeping this in mind, then, you would read Summary Statements #1 and #2 just before reading the third paragraph. Then, after writing the Summary Statement for Paragraph #3, you would read Summary Statements #1, #2 and #3 BEFORE tackling reading Paragraph #4, and so on, and so on.