He proposed to explain how it came about that right overcame the primitive reign of might, that the strong were induced to serve the weak, and the people to purchase a fancied tranquillity at the price of a real felicity.

So he stated his problem; and to solve it he had to consider the "state of nature" which Hobbes had conceived as a state of war and Locke as a state of peace.

Rousseau imagines our first savage ancestors living in isolation, wandering in the forests, occasionally co-operating, and differing from the animals only by the possession of a faculty for improving themselves (la faculte de se perfectionner).

After a stage in which families lived alone in a more or less settled condition, came the formation of groups of families, living together in a definite territory, united by a common mode of life and sustenance, and by the common influence of climate, but without laws or government or any social organisation.
It is this state, which was reached only after a long period, not the original state of nature, that Rousseau considers to have been the happiest period of the human race.
This period of the development of human faculties, holding a just mean between the indolence of the primitive state and the petulant activity of our self-love, must be the happiest and most durable epoch.

The more we reflect on it, the more we find that this state was the least exposed to revolutions and the best for man; and that he can have left it only through some fatal chance which, for the common advantage, should never have occurred.