I am reading Ernst Gellner's book, Nations and Nationalism for my class on nationalism in East Asia.  I have read this book several times (and blogged about it here and here and here) and I am quite aware of its limitations.  But I have not really mentioned here a brief couple of lines from Gellner that speak to Confucianism's modern fate (with all due apologies to Levenson…):

Doctrinal elegance, simplicity, exiguousness, strict unitarianism, without very much in the way of intellectually offensive frills: these helped Islam survive into the modern world better than do doctrinally more luxuriant faiths.  But if that is so, one might well ask why an agrarian ideology such as Confucianism should not have survived even better; for such a belief system was even more firmly centered on rules of morality and the observance of order and hierarchy, and even less concerned with theological or cosmological dogma.  Perhaps, however, a strict and emphatic, insistent unitarianism is better here than indifference to doctrine coupled with concern for morality.  The moralities and political ethics of agro-literate polities are just a little too brazenly deferential and inegalitarian for a modern taste.  this may have made the perpetuation of Confucianism implausible in a modern society, at least under the same name and under the same management. (78) 

hmm…..  no time to explicate this now – running to class – but think about it: does Gellner get this right?