G. D. H. Cole's functionalism marks the final stage in the development of Gierke's ideas in an English setting. Indeed, by the time Cole had finished there was not much of Gierke left – gone was the notion of real group personality, along with the organicism, the Hegelianism, the historical sweep and the intellectual rigour, all to be replaced by very little. Nevertheless, Cole does not mark the end of Gierke's influence on English political thought in general. For while guild socialists, and others, were trying to come to terms with the newly distended condition of the British state in wartime, one of Cole's contemporaries, and fellow functionalists, Harold Laski, was attempting to pursue an academic career in North America. Laski left Oxford in 1914, and having been rejected from the army on medical grounds, moved first to Montreal, then to Harvard, where he remained until 1920. It was during this period that Laski developed the theory which he called political pluralism, and he did so against an intellectual backdrop which differed in two important respects from its English equivalent. First, the American experience of the Great War, though politically charged, did not raise to such an acute degree the themes of national identity and national survival which had polarised political thought in England. Second, the United States were combined in a durable and effective federal structure, such that the expression of a federalistic feeling was less likely to represent a distinctive theoretical standpoint there.