The message of this book is that Hobbes, and not Descartes, was the first to develop a specifically modern philosophy. The manifestion of modern subjectivity in Hobbes‹s work is expressed for the first time in a systematic development from perception up to political action. The author shows how, based on a mechanistic ontology and natural philosophy, Hobbes tried in vain to develop a human self-understanding and how this yielded an epistemological skepticism whose outcome for political philosophy was political absolutism.