ABSTRACT
Most critics would agree that the leading philosopher twentieth-century Anglo-American idealism has produced is Alfred North Whitehead. Whitehead saw in Platonic idealism a structural wholeness, capable of doing justice to the infinitely complicated strands of existence. In Whitehead's view, process forms a continuous chain of becoming; integrally linked from the lowest species of biological life to the highest forms, that is, the historical career of mankind. The constant intersection of process and reality forms the essential core of the Whiteheadian system. Whitehead's search for a happy balance in philosophy between permanence and change parallels efforts in other fields, particularly institutional economics, to prove that social systems fail only because of a lack of liberality. Whitehead was metaphysically unprepared and politically unwilling to deal with the material preconditions of world peace. Whitehead illustrates the limitations of idealist metaphysics by moving from a social study of the problem of conflict and harmony to an abstract statement concerning the "sense of peace."
