Which C.S. Lewis book was published in 1943 as a critique of modern education and moral subjectivism?

The Abolition of Man was published in 1943 as a critique of educational theories that Lewis believed undermined objective value.

The book developed from three lectures Lewis delivered at the University of Durham in February 1943. Its argument begins with concerns about a school textbook’s treatment of emotional responses and moral judgment. Lewis argues that education should cultivate appropriate responses to real values, not merely teach students to dismiss value as subjective feeling.

The work introduces or discusses the Tao, Lewis’s term for a broad tradition of objective moral principles found across cultures. He warns that rejecting such principles would not liberate humanity; instead, it would leave powerful people able to reshape human nature according to arbitrary desires.

The title does not refer simply to the extinction of human beings. Lewis uses “the abolition of man” for a condition in which humanity loses the moral framework that makes genuinely human judgment possible. The book is therefore a philosophical critique of relativism, not one of Lewis’s fictional Narnia stories.