Furthermore, he was heavily influenced by Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer and US-American pragmatism: Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and especially George Herbert Mead.
Although he joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and made a career as a member of the 'Leipzig School' under Hans Freyer, he was a political opportunist: his main work Der Mensch appeared in 1940 and was published in English translation in 1987 as Man.
Gehlen was a modernist conservative who accepted the cultural changes brought about by the industrial revolution and by mass society (see his Man in the age of technology, Chapter V).
[3] Since the mid-2010s, there has occurred a Gehlen revival based in part on the predictions in his book Moral und Hypermoral as concerns the development of German (and Western) politics from 1969.
"On Cultural Crystallization"), Gehlen wrote: "I am predicting that the history of ideas has come to an end and that we have arrived at the epoch of post-histoire, so that now the advice Gottfried Benn gave the individual, 'Make do with what you have,' is valid for humanity as a whole".