C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man was published in 1943.
The book developed from three lectures Lewis delivered at the University of Durham in February 1943. It is a compact work of moral philosophy rather than a novel. Lewis examines education, objective value, and the danger of treating moral judgments as nothing more than personal feelings or social conditioning.
The work is often discussed alongside Lewis’s Christian apologetics, but its argument is broader than a simple denominational statement. He presents a defense of what he calls the Tao, a term he uses for a shared body of traditional moral principles found across cultures.
Readers sometimes confuse the publication date with the dates of Lewis’s wartime radio talks, which began in 1941 and were later collected in Mere Christianity. The Abolition of Man was a separate project, first issued as a book in 1943.