… all early “law-giving” consisted in efforts to record and make known a law that was conceived as unalterably given. A “legislator” might endeavor to purge the law of supposed corruptions, or to restore it to its pristine purity, but it was not thought that he could make new law. … But if nobody had the power or intention to change the law … this does not mean that law did not continue to develop.

In one work (Theory of Moral Sentiments) we have a theory of the way in which “sympathetic transfers of feeling” set limits to the assertion of individual interests and promote social harmony: partly by creating moral sentiments in the minds of individuals which directly modify their conduct, and partly by causing society to evolve a legal system that expresses the moral sentiments common to the mass of mankind, and imposes restraints which not every individual would always impose on himself. In the other work (Wealth of Nations) we have a theory of the way in which individual interests, thus limited, themselves promote economic adjustment and harmony. The two treatises therefore give us complementary halves of [Adam] Smith's social philosophy.