ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the Aristotle's terminology that the whole is prior to the parts. As it succeeds in merging the initially disjointed individual lives within it into a common existence, it draws ever closer to that state of full integration and organisation which allows us, without absurdity, to speak of society as a body social, an organism sui generis. George Berkeley's essay from the Guardian, quoted as 'The Bond of Society', contains a classical statement of its fundamental ideas. The pope's people argue that there can be only one head to the body of Christendom for a two-headed beast, an animal biceps, would be a monstrosity. The principle of the heterogony of purposes appears with Adam Smith, as is natural in an economist, in the specific form of the assertion that the selfishness of each leads, through the mechanism of the market, to the benefit of all.
