I never realized what a radical C. S.
Lewis was until reading his essays in God in the Dock. One of
Lewis’s great concerns was the rise of the modern, technocratic
welfare state. Lewis warned that the purpose of government is to
protect individual liberties, not to transform society or to provide
for its citizens. When a population forgets that limited role of
government it is headed inevitably for tyranny.
Lewis writes, “. . . classical
political theory, with its Stoical, Christian, and juristic
key-conceptions (natural law, the value of the individual, the rights
of man), has died. The modern State exists not to protect our rights
but to do us good or make us good—anyway, to do something to us or
to make us something. Hence the new name ‘leaders’ for those who
were once ‘rulers’. We are less their subjects than their wards,
pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can
say to them, ‘Mind your own business.’ Our whole lives are
their business.” [from the essay, Is Progress Possible? in
God in the Dock, 314]
Lewis published this in 1958.
Apparently we weren’t listening.
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