After having first interpreted Thomas Hobbes’ political philosophy as a paradigmatic
example of a questionable individualistic humanism, Louis Althusser saw it as a
prefiguration of the alternative materialist approach, grounded on contingency, which he
developed in the last part of his work as a new reading of the Marxist tradition. The paper
reconstructs and assesses this late retrospective appropriation of Hobbes’ political
philosophy. Focusing on the central thesis according to which society is not an organism,
but an encounter, it offers a symptomatic reading of it, by showing that it reveals a deeper
aporia of Althusser’s “aleatory materialism” itself. Indeed, the recourse to epicurean
atomism prevents Althusser from maintaining his original and more fundamental thesis
about the social formation as a complex overdetermined whole.
