After 1953 and the installation of Imre Nagy as Prime Minister, Heller was able to safely undertake her doctoral studies under the supervision of Lukács, and in 1955 she began to teach at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Budapest.

Lukács, Heller and other critical theorists emerged from the Revolution with the belief that Marxism and socialism needed to be applied to different nations in individual ways, effectively questioning the role of the Soviet Union in Hungary's future.

From 1963 can be seen the emergence of what would later be called the "Budapest School", a philosophical forum that was formed by Lukács to promote the renewal of Marxist criticism in the face of practiced and theoretical socialism.

After the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact forces and the crushing of dissent, however, the School and Heller came to believe that the Eastern European regimes were entirely corrupted and that reformist theory was apologist.

After Lukács died in 1971, the School's members were victims of political persecution, were made unemployed through their dismissal from their university jobs, and were subjected to official surveillance and general harassment.

[citation needed] Rather than remain as dissidents, Heller and her husband the philosopher Ferenc Fehér, along with many other members of the core group of the School, chose exile in Australia in 1977.

[2] Heller and Fehér encountered what they regarded as the sterility of local culture and lived in relative suburban obscurity close to La Trobe University in Melbourne.

They assisted in the founding of Thesis Eleven in 1980, and its development into a leading Australian journal of social theory and forum for "politically independent" left wing thought.

[7] As described by Tormey, Heller's mature thought during this time period was based on the tenets that can be attributed to her personal history and experience as a member of the Budapest School, focusing on the stress on the individual as agent; the hostility to the justification of the state of affairs by reference to non-moral or non-ethical criteria; the belief in "human substance" as the origin of everything that is good or worthwhile; and the hostility to forms of theorizing and political practice that deny equality, rationality and self-determination in the name of "our" interests and needs, however defined.

Heller researched and wrote prolifically on ethics, Shakespeare, aesthetics, political theory, modernity, and the role of Central Europe in historical events.