Soul, Political Body, Legislation

As has been previously discussed, one potential casualty of an academic disconnect of Philosophy and Political Science is the systemstic relation between the Nichomachean Ethics and the Politics.  Another is between the latter and On the Soul.  For, in the Politics, two paragraphs after the better-known thesis "Man is by nature a political animal" is Aristotle's principle that "the whole is of necessity prior to the part", which is the writ large correlate of a concept of Organism that he presents in On the Soul.  More precisely, Soul is the Form of the manifold parts that constitute a Body, unifying them by animating the Body.  Analogously, therefore, following Plato's example, rulership animates the manifold of the political Body by unifying them via Legislation, which constitutes its Soul.  Thus, lost in the academic disconnect is the scope of Aristotle's systematic ambition, thereby reducing the standard focus in the Politics to his comparison of the various modes of Legislation, which abstracts from the function of the latter as the Soul of the collective Organism.