Despite the enduring popularity of C.S. Lewis's writings on religion and morality, his thought is seldom explicitly tied to politics. In C.S. Lewis on Politics and the Natural Law, Justin Buckley Dyer and Micah J. Watson suggest that this is a serious oversight. Dyer and Watson bring together Lewis's fiction, non-fiction, talks, letters, and academic work on medieval literature to reconstruct Lewis's underlying intellectual framework. It is impressive scholarship.

Dyer and Watson show that Lewis was deeply interested in politics at its most basic level: questions about how human beings ought to treat each other and how we know this. They trace Lewis's answer to these questions back to his commitment to a robust conception of Reason. Indeed, the book contends that, for Lewis, Reason had equal status with Scripture as a form of revelation of God's nature (35). Reason shows us the objective, knowable facts of our moral reality — which Dyer and Watson describe as the Natural Law.

Lewis's position is reconstructed by leading the reader through a series of binary choices that Lewis discerns in modern thought. For example, Reason is the result of evolutionary processes or is a divinely created fact of the world. If it is the former, it is fallible and evolution undermines its own foundation; only if it is the later can Reason be trusted. Reason gives us insight into an objective moral reality or — as theologian Karl Barth suggests — it does not. If it does, it unifies our experience of moral reality and of God. If it does not, then “there is no difference left between pure religion and devil worship” (53). Ultimately, such choices lead Lewis to insist that accepting a created, rational, universal natural law is a pillar of “all clear thinking about the universe we live in” (37).

The stakes here are nothing less than “our civilization and our souls” (76). Dyer and Watson develop Lewis's belief that civilization must repel the frontal assault on objective moral reality mounted by moderns like Bacon, Hobbes, Rousseau, Hegel, down to modern linguists. Their modernity unleashes a creeping nihilism, manifest equally by Nazism, Communism, Reformed Theology, and English Boarding School syllabi. By attacking Reason we have “abolished” the essential spiritual nature of humans. In his political moods, Lewis worries that this turns us over to a technocratic liberalism that sees individuals as mere matter, to be molded as is deemed socially desirable.

As with any well-executed work, the clarity of Dyer and Watson's presentation also emphasizes the tensions and elisions within it. Three are particularly notable. The first is that many readers of the various modern thinkers Lewis engages will resist the interpretations Lewis gives of them. A few examples give a flavor of the whole. Without careful analysis of Rousseau's complex project, Lewis dismisses Rousseau, insisting that the concept of positive freedom betrays the “deep hatred of personal freedom hidden in the heart” of the entire Enlightenment project (71). Lewis's disapproval of Hegel — really of all phenomenology — rests on a distorted understanding of his teleology. Even the approving use of Locke's account of Rational Natural Law is problematic; no mention is made of the tensions between that theory and the account of reason in Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. For Lewis's Manichean reading of modernity to be compelling, Dyer and Watson need to give it a much fuller explication and defense.

Second, Dyer and Watson describe what they call Lewis's “Imaginative Turn”: his decision to deploy fiction as the principle means of presenting his views as he grew skeptical of the power of reasoned argument. They insist this had nothing to do with his bruising exchange with G.E.M Anscombe, but, rather, is forced upon Lewis by modernity's lack of faith in reason (55). Nevertheless, Lewis holds that Reason is a form of divine revelation, so a rejection of its persuasive power surely deserves substantial treatment.

This links to a third issue Dyer and Watson could profitably expand upon. The last third of the text is spent trying to reconcile why Lewis — apostle of Reason and Natural Law — ends up advocating a conventionally conservative form of classical liberalism combined with a modified harm principle (111). Ultimately, Natural Law emerges as less a political theory and more a pedagogic aim and personal ethic. Dyer and Watson suggest in various ways that Lewis worried that the human faculty of reason was so corrupted that human institutions could not be trusted to enact it. However, another possibility, unaddressed, is that Lewis sensed that his own absolute certainty in Reason and Natural Law could easily lead to the kind of social engineering Lewis dramatized with the fictional National Institute for Coordinated Experiments (NICE) — cited repeatedly to highlight Lewis's concerns with technocratic liberalism. Perhaps Lewis understands that NICE, the social engineering of Plato's Republic and Laws, and numerous other state-sponsored atrocities (fictional or otherwise), all share an unquestioning faith in some foundational principle. Perhaps Lewis recognized that certainty without self-doubt — even certainty in created Reason itself — is simply inappropriate for politics amidst a fallen humanity.

In the final appraisal, Dyer and Watson succeed completely in their aim of bringing us inside Lewis's thinking about politics. For those of us whose wallets contain tattered, handwritten quotes from Lewis's work, C.S. Lewis on Politics and the Natural Law is fascinating. For scholars of Lewis's thought, this book is essential. For those for whom human reason, politics, and even encounters with God are marked by ambiguity, revision, and continual renewal, however, it is less clear that Lewis's conceptions of Reason and Natural Law speak to our condition. Yet, in presenting Lewis's claims as clearly as they do, Dyer and Watson have enabled us to ask that question directly and precisely. Leaving its other virtues aside, this makes their work a valuable contribution to the history of political thought.