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The Intellectual History of the Federal Republic
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Intellectual history has been a significant, though minority strand in the historiography of modern Germany. If intellectual historians have often published in journals devoted to political theory, critical theory and German studies rather than in the main organs of the field, publishing houses on both sides of the Atlantic have produced a steady stream of monographs about German intellectuals, their discourses and traditions. Understandably, historians have been intensely interested in the intellectual origins of the Conservative Revolution and National Socialism, as well as in debates within Marxism and socialism more generally. The Jewish émigrés, such as Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Leo Strauss and members of the Frankfurt School, have also been the object of detailed examination. Now we can witness a developing literature on the intellectual history of the Federal Republic. Of course, there were massive—and problematic—discursive and personal continuities between the Federal Republic and previous German regimes, and for