Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was a Francophone Genevan philosopher of the Enlightenment of the 18th century. Like his predecessor Hobbes, Rousseau advocated the theory of the “state of nature”, but unlike Hobbes he theorized that that state which allegedly existed before the institution of government was a peaceful coexistence until man’s environment corrupted his good nature which led men to band together under a “social contract” to create civil government to promote and foster their good tendencies. Rousseau’s imagined peaceful state of nature has been termed by some as the age of “the noble savage.”
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