It might be objected that "human" beings have never existed and never could exist without others, nor, consequently, without judgements of right and wrong. This was the common eighteenth-century opinion. But Rousseau really escapes this criticism, since the creature he paints is admittedly not human, but pre-human, "living in a state of animality".

—Lester Crocker, "Introduction", in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourse on the Origin of Inequality