 At the time, philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Immanuel Kant were preoccupied by the structure of society and how it may influence human interrelations.Philosophers were not solely thinking of the child as an individual but rather at what he/she can bring to creating human togetherness and societal order.Natorp's perspective was influenced by Plato's ideas about the relation between the individual and the city-state ("polis").