Bloch was influenced by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx, as well as by apocalyptic and religious thinkers such as Thomas Müntzer, Paracelsus, and Jacob Böhme.

Among his many academic students from this period was his assistant Manfred Buhr, who earned his doctorate with him in 1957, and was later a professor in Greifswald, then director of the Central Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences (ADC) in Berlin and who became a critic of Bloch.

[citation needed] However, the Hungarian uprising in 1956 led Bloch to revise his view of the SED (Socialist Unity Party) regime, whilst retaining his Marxist orientation.

[citation needed] When the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, he did not return to the GDR, but went to Tübingen in West Germany, where he received an honorary chair in Philosophy.

[6] The Principle of Hope tries to provide an encyclopedic account of mankind's and nature's orientation towards a socially and technologically improved future.

[citation needed] It is cited as a key influence by Jürgen Moltmann in his Theology of Hope (1967, Harper and Row, New York), by Dorothee Sölle, and by Ernesto Balducci.

[10] Bloch's concept of concrete utopias found in The Principle of Hope was used by José Esteban Muñoz to shift the field of performance studies.