Contemplation and Legislation

Typically in American academia, Philosophy and Political Science Departments are separated, one consequence of which is that Ethics and Political Philosophy are pedagogically severed.  Accordingly, the final passages of the Nichomachean Ethics, in which Aristotle transitions from one study to the other, is in intellectual limbo.  Thus typically unrecognized is that he overrides his apparent conclusion of his earlier work--that the Highest Good is Contemplation--with the acknowledgement that humans also need external Goods, which requires community.  The Politics thus begins by continuing the inquiry into the Highest Good by asserting that it can be achieved only by the best political organization.  Furthermore, he cites Legislation as the means to that end.  But Legislation is the same process by which private standards are effected, as has been previously discussed.  Thus, the superiority of Legislation over Contemplation as a process engaged in by Mind is also established in the transition, a feature of Aristotelianism that easily falls through the cracks in academia, as does the reason why someone who seems to advocate an apolitical Individualism is also one who asserts that "man is by nature a political animal".