The Work
The Abolition of Man: or, Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools was published by Oxford University Press in 1943. It originated as three lectures given to the Socratic Club at Oxford in 1943. At approximately 80 pages in the main text (plus a substantial appendix), it is Lewis's most concentrated work of philosophical argument - a dense, precise, and prophetic engagement with the consequences of moral subjectivism in education and culture. It was expanded in Lewis's own science fiction novel That Hideous Strength (1945), which dramatizes in narrative form the world that the Abolition predicts.
The book has grown continuously in influence. In 1999, a survey of evangelical Christian scholars voted it the most important Christian book of the twentieth century after the Bible. It is now assigned in philosophy, theology, and education courses in universities around the world, and its warnings about the 'abolition of man' through the combination of moral subjectivism and technological power are more widely cited than at any point since its publication.
Biblical Engagement
Romans 2:14-15 - 'For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness' - is the foundational biblical text for Lewis's concept of the 'Tao.' The 'Tao' is Lewis's name for the universal moral law that is accessible to human reason in every culture - the shared moral order of which Paul speaks in Romans 2. Lewis chooses a Chinese term deliberately to emphasize the universal, trans-cultural character of this moral order: it is not specifically Jewish, Christian, Greek, or British, but the common moral inheritance of humanity.
Genesis 1:27 - 'So God created man in his own image' - grounds Lewis's anthropology against the debunkers. The 'Abolition' that the title threatens is the abolition of this image: if the Tao (natural moral law) is replaced by the naturalistic account of morality as mere sentiment or social convention, then human beings lose their dignity as bearers of the divine image and become, in principle, indefinitely manipulable by those who possess the technology to manipulate them.
Proverbs 8:22 - 'The LORD possessed me [Wisdom] at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old' (ESV) - connects the Tao to biblical Wisdom. Lewis does not develop this connection explicitly in the Abolition, but his Appendix - a collection of moral examples from Egyptian, Babylonian, Hindu, Chinese, Greek, Roman, Norse, and Jewish sources - is implicitly an illustration of the Wisdom tradition's claim that the moral order is built into the structure of creation and accessible to all who seek it with honesty.
Matthew 5:17 - 'Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil' - provides the New Testament grounding of Lewis's claim that the Tao is not abolished but fulfilled by Christianity. The moral insights of all cultures represent genuine (if partial and sometimes distorted) glimpses of the moral law that Christ's teaching brings to full expression. Christianity does not annihilate the Tao's moral insights but fulfills and transcends them.
Author and Context
Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) was Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Magdalen College, Oxford, from 1925 to 1954, when he was appointed the first Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English Literature at Cambridge. His scholarly expertise in medieval thought - particularly the medieval understanding of the 'Tao' as the natural moral order (ordo naturalis) built into creation - provides the intellectual foundation for the Abolition.
The immediate occasion was a school textbook on English composition (The Control of Language by Alec King and Martin Ketley, referred to in the book as 'The Green Book' by 'Gaius and Titius') that Lewis found philosophically pernicious: it taught students that emotional responses to beauty and grandeur ('the sublime') were merely subjective feelings projected onto external objects rather than valid responses to objective qualities. Lewis saw this as a small but representative instance of a pervasive educational philosophy that was systematically destroying students' capacity for objective moral and aesthetic response - the capacity he called 'the chest,' the middle term between the head (reason) and the belly (appetite).
The wartime context (1943) is significant. Lewis was acutely aware that the totalitarian regimes - both Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia - represented extreme versions of the tendency he was diagnosing: the subordination of moral tradition to ideological will, and the use of technology and power to remold human beings according to the plans of those who had abandoned the Tao.
Key Arguments
The first lecture ('Men Without Chests') diagnoses the educational disease: the elimination of the 'chest' (the trained emotional responses that align feeling with reason) through a debunking pseudo-sophistication that treats all value judgments as merely subjective. The result is not freedom but paralysis: men without chests cannot actually act on their values because they have been trained not to believe in values.
The second lecture ('The Way') argues that there is no alternative foundation for ethics outside the Tao. Every attempt to construct a new morality from allegedly 'scientific' or value-free premises merely smuggles in a selection from the Tao that the critic has not consciously examined. The debunker who rejects traditional morality can only criticize it from within some moral framework - which, however unacknowledged, is itself a part of the Tao.
The third lecture ('The Abolition of Man') projects the end result: a world in which the 'conditioners' - those who control education, propaganda, and eventually biotechnology - remake human nature according to their own unarticulated desires, since they have abandoned the Tao that would provide any external standard for their program. The result is not the liberation of humanity but its abolition: the final generation of conditioned humans are 'artifacts,' not persons.
The Appendix marshals examples of the Tao from Babylonian, Egyptian, Hebrew, Hindu, Greek, Roman, Norse, Chinese, and Anglo-Saxon sources, demonstrating the remarkable convergence of moral insight across vastly different cultures.
Reception
The book was reviewed warmly but modestly in 1943. Its influence grew slowly and then dramatically in the late twentieth century as the debates it anticipated - about moral relativism in education, about biotechnology and the manipulation of human nature, about the cultural consequences of moral subjectivism - became central concerns of both religious and secular public discourse.
Conservative Catholic, Protestant, and Anglican theologians have made it the basis of natural law arguments in bioethics debates. Secular philosophers including Gilbert Meilaender and Alasdair MacIntyre have engaged with its arguments. J.I. Packer called it Lewis's most important work.
Legacy
The Abolition of Man is Lewis's most enduring contribution to philosophical theology. Its warnings about the abolition of the imago Dei through moral subjectivism and technological manipulation are more relevant in the twenty-first century than they were in 1943, as debates about genetic modification, artificial intelligence, and moral education occupy the center of cultural and theological discourse.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study Romans 1:18-2:16 (natural revelation and the moral law written in the heart), Proverbs 8 (Wisdom as the moral order of creation), Genesis 1:26-28 (the imago Dei as the ground of human dignity), Matthew 5:17-20 (Christ fulfilling rather than abolishing the moral law), and Psalm 19:7-11 (the law of God and the moral law of nature).
Further Reading
- Andrew Cuneo and Mark Murphy, eds., Natural Law and the Possibility of Natural Ethics (2014) - the best philosophical context for Lewis's argument. - Michael Ward, Planet Narnia (2008) - while focused on the Chronicles, illuminates Lewis's engagement with the medieval Tao tradition. - Gilbert Meilaender, The Taste for the Other: The Social and Ethical Thought of C.S. Lewis (1978) - the most thorough study of Lewis's ethics, with substantial attention to the Abolition.