From the beginning of the 1960s onward, the influence of the “Frankfurter School” grew in Germany. Its principal exponents in the Federal Republic, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer - both Jewish philosophers in the Marxist tradition - had left Germany during the period of National Socialist rule, as had Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse and Ernst Block. Their theories profoundly influenced the student movements at the end of the 1960s. This school of critical theory turned against both the conservative-apolitical tradition in the wake of Existentialism and the tendency of Positivism to accept existing conditions as the natural course of events.

Since the 1970s, German philosophy has been increasingly receptive to the Anglo-Saxon tradition - and, conversely, the latter has derived more and more impulses from Continental European thought. The philosophy of Jurgen Habermas, who taught for many years in the United States, is a clear manifestation of this development. It represents an attempt to combine key elements of Continental Western philosophy and those of Anglo-Saxon thought - adherence to generally binding moral concepts and a close connection to fac-tuality.