A Macat Analysis of C. S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man

Northern Irish academic, novelist, and broadcaster C. S. Lewis’s 1943 philosophical work The Abolition of Man is subtitled Reflections on Education With Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools. It is about the power of education to shape the minds of individuals and improve society (or harm it, if badly done), and encompasses everything from the scientific worldview at the time to philosophical arguments about right and wrong. At the heart of the work, Lewis condemns a contemporary trend for teaching children that values are subjective, stressing instead that for human society to flourish, people must understand that morality is, in fact, objective, and that a universal moral law exists. In writing Abolition, Lewis was leveraging his success as an author of fiction into a career as a public intellectual. National Review ranked the book at number seven in its list of “100 Best Non-Fiction Books of the Twentieth Century.”