Everything on this page is written by UECF.NET as background for readers new to the book. It is our own introductory material, drawn from widely available biographical facts about C. S. Lewis, and it is not a quotation or paraphrase of any passage from The Abolition of Man. The printed book remains the place to hear Lewis in his own words.
Who was C. S. Lewis?
Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) was born in Belfast, Ireland, and spent most of his adult life as a scholar of English literature at Oxford and, later, Cambridge University. Raised in a churchgoing home, he became an atheist as a teenager and young man. In his early thirties, through philosophical reading, conversations with Oxford friends — including fellow academic and future Lord of the Rings author J. R. R. Tolkien — and his own reflection, Lewis moved first to a general theism and then, in 1931, to Christian faith.
From the mid-1930s onward Lewis became one of the twentieth century’s most widely read Christian writers, producing academic literary criticism alongside popular theology, fiction, and children’s literature. He is perhaps best known today for the seven-book Chronicles of Narnia series and for Mere Christianity, adapted from wartime BBC radio talks. He was a founding member of the Inklings, an informal Oxford circle of friends who met to read and discuss one another’s writing. Lewis died on 22 November 1963, at his home in Oxford.
Where The Abolition of Man fits in his work
The Abolition of Man began as the Riddell Memorial Lectures, delivered on three successive evenings (24–26 February 1943) at King’s College, Newcastle, then part of the University of Durham, and published later that year by Oxford University Press. It appeared in the same wartime years as Lewis’s BBC radio talks that became Mere Christianity and his popular fantasy The Screwtape Letters, but it is a different kind of book: a compact work of moral philosophy rather than popular theology or fiction, aimed at a question Lewis saw as urgent for education specifically — whether value judgments can be objectively true, and what happens to a society that teaches its young people they cannot be. UECF.NET’s note: Lewis himself later felt the book had been largely ignored on first publication; its reputation as one of his most important works grew substantially in the decades afterward.
What the book covers
Across three lectures — “Men Without Chests,” “The Way,” and the title lecture, “The Abolition of Man” — Lewis argues that a wartime English textbook’s small point about grammar smuggles in the claim that all value judgments are merely reports of feeling; that no rational or instinctive standpoint outside the inherited moral tradition (which he calls “the Tao”) can ground new values from scratch; and that abandoning objective value altogether would place unlimited power over human nature in the hands of whoever ends up controlling education, psychology, and technology. The book closes with an appendix, “Illustrations of the Tao,” comparing moral maxims from many of the world’s ethical traditions. UECF.NET’s chapter-by-chapter study guides, linked from the contents page, summarize and discuss each of these sections in our own words.