Literally millions of readers, from Evangelical Christians to Leo Strauss, have appreciated the writings of Clive Staples Lewis. Lewis (1898–1963) was one of the most-read authors of the twentieth century, and he continues to be read with avidity in the twenty-first. A full-length book on this major author's contributions to natural law and political thinking is a welcome addition to the study of political theory.

C. S. Lewis first and foremost saw himself as a Christian apologist; he was a convert to Anglicanism. The still uncertain place of natural law within Protestant thought makes a book on Lewis's contributions to natural-law thinking intriguing. Many people see natural law as a “Catholic theory” because so many Catholics subscribe to it, but leading Protestants such as Calvin and Luther affirmed it in one form or another (91). Protestant theologian Karl Barth rejected natural law since he believed it overestimates the ability of unaided reason to know how to live a good life. Lewis specifically rejected Barth's stance against natural law in his 1940s radio addresses against Nazism (later collected in his bestselling book Mere Christianity), because human beings as creations of God were not totally depraved by original sin. The rational faculties of human beings are still good enough to discern right from wrong according to Lewis, and when people choose what is right, they imitate the goodness of their Creator.

Authors Dyer and Wilson demonstrate that Lewis was heavily influenced by sixteenth-century British theologian Richard Hooker in his embrace of natural law. The venerable Hooker was also a key influence on the seventeenth-century British philosopher John Locke. Lewis accepted much of what both Hooker and Locke say about politics as his own, embracing the ideas of natural rights and limited government in various essays and letters.

Natural-law obligations grounded in a duty to obey the Creator were fundamental to Lewis's worldview. Lewis read Locke in a way similar to that of many of the American Founders—that is, through Christian eyes. Dyer and Watson show that Lewis focused a great deal of his attention on two of Locke's less-read treatises, Thoughts on Education and The Reasonableness of Christianity (90). Reading these duty-focused works by Locke likely influenced Lewis to identify Locke with the natural-law tradition of Hooker rather than the positivist tradition of Hobbes. Whether Lewis's interpretation of Locke is ultimately correct or not, the authors admit is open to question (91).

The other idea Lewis took up from Locke, limited government, fit well with his view of original sin's negative (but not completely devastating) effects on human nature. His crooked-timber view of humanity led Lewis to be highly skeptical of government. He severely critiqued the technocratic bureaucracy of his native England and the socialist regimes of Europe at the time. The faith of bureaucrats and socialists in government was misguided, according to Lewis, because flawed human beings could not be assumed to act in the public interest, even if they had the correct understanding of the public interest in the first place. Many commentators have claimed that Lewis was “apolitical,” but as the authors point out, whether he was or was not depends on what one means by “political” (11). Lewis was certainly willing to speak against violations of the natural law and limited government in a general way. However, he was unwilling to endorse specific political parties and candidates in his writings.

As for non-Christians, Lewis believed they had to be persuaded of the natural law using different means; the appeal had to be made through the imagination. The average reader knows C. S. Lewis for his works of fiction, such as The Chronicles of Narnia. After a certain point in the 1940s, fiction became Lewis's primary genre. Some commentators claim that Lewis made this turn toward fiction after being out-argued in a debate with Catholic philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe in 1948, but Dyer and Watson claim more convincingly that his turn was a conscious decision made long before that debate (59). Lewis turned toward fiction because he believed that in a postmodern secular culture, people become blind to philosophical truths through a kind of shallow skepticism. As one of Lewis's characters says in his 1938 science fiction novel Out of the Silent Planet, “our only chance was to publish in the form of fiction what would certainly not be listened to as fact. … There would be indications enough in the narrative for the few readers—the very few—who at present were prepared to go further into the matter” (56). In other words, Lewis wrote on an esoteric level for those open to natural law and Christianity, and an exoteric level for postmoderns who needed to have their minds opened. If anything, Lewis's turn toward fiction is due to his encounter with the writings of George MacDonald, who pursued the same tactic of communicating theological truths through the imagination (143).

Some of the best passages in the book take fictional characters from Lewis's novels and relate them to his arguments about natural law. For examples of villains’ relation to the natural law, Dyer and Watson point to Lewis's space trilogy. Out of the Silent Planet presents a character, Wetson, who believes societal Progress gives an individual the justification to commit murder (138). Perelandra, the next book in the trilogy, shows what happens to Wetson after he abandons even the idea of Progress and becomes a nihilist; Wetson meets a dismal end (139). That Hideous Strength, the last book in the trilogy, features a character named Frost who is a completely amoral technocrat. Frost explains away violations of the natural law in materialist terms, but ultimately is unable to control his own passions since he denies the agency of his own reason over them. For examples of heroes, Dyer and Watson turn to Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia. The Narnia stories are full of characters who know and respond to both the “deep magic” and Aslan's laws. There are also characters who transgress and have to make amends, such as Edmund in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (144). The character Eustace in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is Lewis's personification of the vacuous modern moral education he believed children in his time were receiving, the same sort of education contained in the “Green Book” Lewis criticized in The Abolition of Man (77). Eustace's education turned him into a monster, but he found his way to Aslan after seeing himself for what he really was.

Justin Buckley Dyer and Micah J. Watson have done C. S. Lewis and natural-law aficionados alike a service by writing this book. The authors acknowledge Lewis's influence on their own careers as political theorists; it “introduced us to the world of political and social philosophy,” they write. There are many other philosophers and writers on politics who have acknowledged Lewis's thought on natural law as well: Leon Kass, John Finnis, Alvin Plantinga, and Joseph Ratzinger, to name a few (134). For a supposedly apolitical man, Lewis has made many more political.