 While Mou’s argument that Confucian political thought is too narrow is certainly controversial, all agree that at least some classical thinkers focus on effective technology for the administration of power and the maintenance of order, to the exclusion of ethical concerns. Indeed, one of the better arguments that Confucians really did refuse to separate the ethical and the political is simply that so many of the Confucians’ critics interpreted them in this way. Whatever we decide about early Confucians, it is quite evident that a millennium later, most Neo-Confucians took ethics and politics to be mutually entailing, as we will see in  Section 4.