This article is about the fictional theory of the state. It revisits the claim that the English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes and the German jurist Samuel von Pufendorf had collectively shaped the theory’s foundational concept; namely the conception of the political state as a moral person. The paper argues against this by analyzing Hobbes’s and Pufendorf’s theories of the state, showing how, underlying their seemingly resembling arguments, they held profoundly different understandings the idea of the state as a person and the meaning of moral agency. The paper thus suggests that Hobbes and Pufendorf had developed two different kinds of the fictional theory of the state.