Why was Hobbes never elected a Fellow of the Royal Society? The question has been asked and answered in nearly all the intellectual biographies and other such studies of Hobbes, as well as in several histories of the early Royal Society itself. Since I wish to discuss the same question again, it is worth pausing at the outset to neutralise two possible doubts about the value of the exercise. It might seem in the first place that, since Hobbes was in his old age by the time the Society was formally incorporated in 1662, the question of his membership could scarcely have arisen. But in fact both Hobbes and his contemporary biographer John Aubrey viewed his exclusion as a deliberate and hostile act on the part of the Society-men. Hobbes went so far as to complain to Aubrey that the Society should not only have ‘forborn to do me injury’ but should have ‘made me reparation afterward’. ‘All these people’, he publicly declared in 1668, ‘have wounded me and are my enemies.’

A second and more cogent objection might be that the question I have asked, and whatever answer may be given to it, can scarcely be of great historical importance. But I want to suggest that there are at least two reasons for raising the question anew. One is that some comments on the issue by Hobbes himself indicate that the explanations usually given for his exclusion from the Society have been wide of the mark.