Particularly important is the unchalleged conviction that the family is both, natural and good. Unlike Greece, for instance, where the private realm of the family was not given the positive evaluation of the public realm of the polis in China devotion to family was taken as an obvious good. Laozi's utopia is not one that liberates the individuals from the family; but one that lets families operate with little or no pressure from soical or political units much larger than the viallage. Not only did Chinese thinkers assume that the family is esential to society, they also did not question that it is patrilineal and patriarchal. The family thus also provided for many a model for the ideal political order, on centred on an authoritarian ruler woh would make hierarchical co-operation as natural as it seemed to them in the family.