y-products of
philosophical inquiry.

Two needs have determined philosophical thinking about law. On the one
hand, the paramount social interest in the general security, which as
an interest in peace and order dictated the very beginnings of law,
has led men to seek some fixed basis of a certain ordering of human
action which should restrain magisterial as well as individual
wilfulness and assure a firm and stable social order. On the other
hand, the pressure of less immediate social interests, and the need of
reconciling them with the exigencies of the general security, and of
making continual new compromises because of continual changes in
society, has called ever for readjustment at least of the details of
the social order. It has called continually for overhauling of legal
precepts and for refitting of them to unexpected situations. And this
has led men to seek principles of legal development by which to escape
from authoritative rules which they feared or did not know how to
reject, but could no longer apply to advantage. These principles of
change and growth, however, might easily prove inimical to the general
security, and it was important to reconcile or unify them with the
idea of a fixed basis of the legal order. Thus the philosopher has
sought to construct theories of law and theories of lawmaking and has
sought to unify them by some ultimate solving idea equal to the task
of yielding a perfect law which should stand fast forever. From the
time when lawgivers gave over the attempt to maintain the general
security by belief that particular bodies of human law had been
divinely dictated or divinely revealed or divinely sanctioned, they
have had to wrestle with the problem of proving to mankind that the
law was something fixed and settled, whose authority was beyond
question, while at the same time enabling it to make constant
readjustments and occasional radical changes under the pressure of
infinite and variable human desires. The philosopher has worked upon
this problem with the materials of the actual legal systems of the
time and place, or with the legal materials of the past upon which
his generation had built. Hence in closer view philosophies of law
have been attempts to give a rational account of the law of the time
and place, or attempts to formulate a general theory of the legal
order to meet the needs of some given period of legal development, or
attempts to state the results of the two former attem