Which C.S. Lewis book develops the idea of the “abolition of man”?

The Abolition of Man develops C.S. Lewis’s argument about the “abolition of man.”

Published in 1943, the book grew out of three lectures Lewis delivered at the University of Durham. He criticized an approach to education that, in his view, treated moral judgments as merely subjective feelings rather than responses to objective values.

Lewis organized the work into three chapters: “Men Without Chests,” “The Way,” and “The Abolition of Man.” He used the Tao as a name for the traditional moral law shared, in his argument, across cultures and religious traditions.

The title does not refer to the disappearance of humanity through a single invention or event. Lewis was warning that technological power, separated from moral formation, could allow people to reshape human nature while losing the qualities that make humane judgment possible.