Indeed, if we read Hobbes’s work through his materialist metaphysics, which is to say through a philosophy resolutely opposed to that articulated by Descartes, we not only see that the iconic Hobbes is something of an imposter born of Descartes’s imagination and philosophical categories. A materialist reading of Hobbes’s philosophy also undermines what we have taken to be the centrality of the individual for his thinking about politics and brings into focus the pacifism that drives his ethical and political work. Put differently, what emerges through this way of seeing Hobbes is a thinker whose appreciation of our embodiedness or materiality issues in a complex portrayal of our profound interdependence and a compelling account of the ways and means to peace.
Samantha Frost, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker: Hobbesian Reflections on Ethics and Politics, p. 2
