ABSTRACT
In Ralph Barton Perry, this chapter discusses with a figure possessing an eighteenth-century moral sense and a nineteenth-century social sense. And in this paradoxical blending of a theory of ethics based on interests and a theory of society oriented towards laissez-faire individualism, he has yet become over the course of years, a honnete homme of the American twentieth century. An investigation of American philosophic history would undoubtedly reveal that its radical democratic elements, whether Christian or secular in origin, were cast in the mold of individual anarchism. Perry is an intensely individualistic thinker. The interests of society, insofar as they show the least deviation from those of individual men, are in Perry's ethic, illegitimate interests. In the tradition pioneered by Vernon Parrington, Perry came to assess American intellectual history as being a steady struggle and interaction between Enlightenment and Puritanism. For Perry, peace has a positive value in that it is the ground for a society of abundance.
