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The Abolition of Man
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 370.1
EAN: 9780060652944
ISBN: 0060652942
Label: HarperOne
Manufacturer: HarperOne
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 128
Publication Date: 2001-03
Publisher: HarperOne
Release Date: March 20, 2001
Studio: HarperOne
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Editorial Review:
C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man purports to be a book specifically about public education, but its central concerns are broadly political, religious, and philosophical. In the best of the book's three essays, "Men Without Chests," Lewis trains his laser-sharp wit on a mid- century English high school text, considering the ramifications of teaching British students to believe in idle relativism, and to reject "the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kinds of things we are." Lewis calls this doctrine the "Tao," and he spends much of the book explaining why society needs a sense of objective values. The Abolition of Man speaks with astonishing freshness to contemporary debates about morality; and even if Lewis seems a bit too cranky and privileged for his arguments to be swallowed whole, at least his articulation of values seems less ego-driven, and therefore is more useful, than that of current writers such as Bill Bennett and James Dobson. --Michael Joseph Gross
C. S. Lewis sets out to persuade his audience of the importance and relevance of universal values such as courage and honor in contemporary society.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - A Dense Defense of Natural Law and the Validity of Reason
As far as I can see, there were two main cornerstones in Lewis' thinking:
(1) The ultimate validity of Reason, perhaps best summed up in his essay "De Futilitate": "Unless all that we take to be knowledge is an illusion, we must hold that in thinking we are not reading rationality into an irrational universe but responding to a rationality with which the universe has always been saturated."
(2) The ultimately objective nature of morality, also known as Natural Law and in ... Read More
Rating: - Gimongously Interesting!
Lewis extracts the meaning of modern western schooling trends, that is, he shows logically and religiously what the modern system implies for the future of human thought and behavior. It's fantastic! Much more interesting than my measly review could possibly indicate!
Rating:  - Biased, religious, and logically flawed.
While this is a great piece if you want to step inside a virtue theorist's mind, as an actual philosophical text it is rather poor.
While it is obviously religiously biased, it is Lewis' own circular paradoxes that lead to a flawed system of logic that can not support itself.
Rating: - How to fix what is broken
This book is a series of three talks where Lewis illustrates the breakdown of education , from a system which embraces natural law, truth, and virtue, to one which embraces much of nothing and feeds back nothing. It is perhaps a bit dated now as teaching methods have moved on (though not necessarily in positive directions), but yet it still has much to say as we contemplate the inadequacy of our present systems and what we need to reclaim to restore them.
Rating: - Value Galore and Remedial for every epoch
I was struck with amazement as I read this most beneficial and interesting book! There are so many books to choose from these days for inquiry or answers to the brokenness in our modern day populace, but this one proved to be top-notch in this writer's opinion. The writer's skill conveys keen insights into the mind to understand mankind's condition, including interpersonal relationships from the intellect. Dead hypothesis that would try to excoriate the common sense displayed here in this wonderful ... Read More
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