The English political pluralists did not have any especial interest in the work of Thomas Hobbes. They were, of course, aware of him as a theorist of the state, and they were as alarmed by his vision of the state as they were by any. But they did not make any attempt to establish what was distinctive about Hobbes's view of the state, and nor did they recognise that his theory of the state was a theory of group personality also. Instead, they tended to equate his ideas with those of other theorists of state sovereignty, and in doing so to gloss over the ways in which Hobbes's ideas were unique. So Maitland identified Hobbes's conception of the state with the cruder picture provided by Henry VIII, allowing the sovereign of each to be understood simply as the life-giving head of a body politic. Figgis, as a former Austinian, placed Hobbes alongside Bodin, as one of ‘the creators of the modern world’, though as a former Austinian he preferred not to dwell on this fact; Barker, meanwhile, bracketed Hobbes with Austin himself, seeing each as advocates of what he called the ‘bare’ theory of state sovereignty. Cole preferred to discount Hobbes altogether, concentrating instead on Rousseau as the likeliest enemy of corporate freedom. And Laski made the clumsiest equation of all, choosing to identify Hobbes's view of freedom with the one produced by Hegel.