Western engagement with the Analects has unfolded in several broad movements, each revealing as much about Western concerns as about Confucius himself. Early missionary readers, especially Jesuits, tended to present Confucius as a rational moral sage whose teachings could be harmonized with Christian ethics, emphasizing themes of moral cultivation, social harmony, and virtuous governance. Enlightenment thinkers then took up the text as a model of rational, largely secular ethics and meritocratic rule, sometimes idealizing Confucius in contrast to European religious and aristocratic institutions. Later, translators such as James Legge treated the Analects as a cornerstone of Chinese civilization, yet often arranged it within developmental hierarchies that implicitly ranked Christianity as more advanced. Throughout these stages, the text was frequently read as if it were a unified philosophical treatise authored by a single mind, rather than a layered compilation of sayings transmitted across generations.

As sinology and academic study matured, Western scholars increasingly turned to philological and historical-critical methods, probing questions of textual authenticity, composite authorship, and the political and social context in which the sayings took shape. This more cautious scholarship highlighted the difficulty of rendering key terms—such as ren, li, yi, de, and junzi—into Western categories without distortion, and it resisted easy assimilation of Confucian ethics to familiar Western frameworks like virtue ethics or natural law. At the same time, interpreters continued to explore the Analects as a vision of governance grounded in moral example rather than coercion, debating both its meritocratic aspirations and its potential to support authoritarian or rigidly hierarchical structures. Ethical self-cultivation, relational identity, and the intertwining of personal virtue with political order became central themes in these readings.

More recent Western interpretations often approach the text through comparative and constructive philosophy, treating it as a serious interlocutor rather than an exotic curiosity. Scholars have drawn parallels between Confucian emphases on character formation, habituation, and practical judgment and similar concerns in Aristotelian ethics or other Western traditions, while also attending to the distinctive role of ritual, family, and social roles in Confucian thought. Some read the Analects as articulating a kind of humanism centered on the possibility of moral growth and the inherent potential for goodness, while others stress its focus on relational selves embedded in networks of obligation. These contemporary perspectives range from critical examinations of its implications for gender and hierarchy to appreciative explorations of its resources for thinking about humane governance and shared ethical life. Across these varied approaches, the Analects is increasingly treated as a complex, many-layered text that invites sustained reflection on how personal virtue, social relationships, and political responsibility are woven together.