The World in Chains: Some Aspects of War and Trade

Written in the bloodiest year of World War I, this fierce philosophical treatise asks a question no one in power wanted answered: if civilization has truly progressed, why does war still exist? John Mavrogordato mounts a bracing argument that modern warfare is not merely terrible but fundamentally obsolete, a relic of barbarism that persists only because it serves the贪婪 of capitalism and the ambitions of empire. He traces the moral contradiction at the heart of liberal democracy: we claim to value individual rights and international cooperation, yet we sanction organized mass slaughter as an instrument of policy. The book dismantles the patriotic appeals that send young men to trenches, exposing how capitalist interests manufacture consent for conflicts that benefit only the powerful. Yet Mavrogordato is no mere polemicist. He writes with philosophical precision about rights, obligations, and the possibility of moral evolution that might someday render war as unthinkable as slavery now seems. A document of remarkable intellectual courage, it remains disturbing precisely because its central insight has lost none of its validity.