judge
The idea of using a hypothetical state of nature as the baseline from which to evaluate political and social institutions appears also in the Preface to Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality: "[I]t is no light undertaking to separate what is original from what is artificial in the present nature of man, and to know correctly a state which no longer exists, which perhaps never existed, which probably never will exist, and about which it is nevertheless necessary to have precise notions in order to judge our present state correctly." A similar exercise in normative imagining can be found in Book V in the section On Travel, para1597-1724 below.