For some time now scholars have debated why Thomas Hobbes was never made a Fellow of the Royal Society. But about his relations with a different learned institution – Oxford University – there has been little doubt. Hobbes had been a student at Magdalene Hall between 1602 and 1608, but thereafter he was (one brief attempt at rapprochement aside) one of Oxford's most inveterate enemies, and indeed an enemy of existing universities altogether. Few of the very many controversial things he said in Leviathan (1651) aroused more immediate anger than his closing claim that the book might be ‘profitably taught in the Universities’. Hobbes's early readers reacted to this statement, as Hobbes himself subsequently acknowledged, with incredulity and disgust. Moreover, when members of the English universities were accused of professing Hobbes's ideas, as Daniel Scargill was at Cambridge in 1668, they were liable to find themselves in serious trouble.

Yet, despite Hobbes's hostility to them, the universities have a significant place in all of his major writings. They were a consistent component of his systematic political philosophy between the Elements of Law of 1640 and the Latin Leviathan of 1668. Hobbes regarded the universities as having a necessary ‘office in a Common-wealth’, and held that it was a duty of the sovereign representative to oversee what they taught. He was also, however, bitterly critical of the political role the universities had played in the Civil Wars, and also critical more generally of the philosophy they taught.