Second Treatise On Civil Government By Jean-Jacques Rousseau

According to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (b. 1712) there is two types of people in the State of Nature a natural or savage man, and modern man. The savage man is the one who existed before organized society and modern man, or we can think of this as natural existence and civil society. In Rousseau’s writing you can see he believes that a savage man is a happy man, and that he believes we are naturally and innately good and that “civilization” turns man bad. Thomas Hobbes is one philosopher that thought differently than Rousseau, he believed natural man was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short and that civilization is responsible for “rescuing” mankind and that being a “savage” is considered bad (Dunning). While John Locke is one philosopher that agrees with Rousseau saying in his Second Treatise on Civil Government, “In the state of nature all men are free to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature” (Hibben).
Rousseau believed in Amour De Soi, French for self-love, the concept of the self-love humans share with
This, however, hinders not, but that philosophers may, if they please, extend their reasoning to the suppos'd state of nature; provided they allow it to be a mere philosophical fiction, which never had, and never cou'd have any reality”(Dunning).
Hume also argues that if we were all so friendly and kind to one another Justice would not be important to us, and that it only comes from the selfishness and the generosity of man along with the limited resources nature provides us. Rousseau thought that education and reason was the reason that man was “unnatural” and corrupted, which Voltaire disagreed with emphatically, which was one of many things the two did not see eye-to-eye with