In the course of our discussion of the German tradition in political thought, we shall focus on the following five main themes: the relation between the individual and society; the primacy of the economic; our engagement with the material world; the notion of the contract; and the function of the state. Using these five ideas as "benchmarks' for the thinkers discussed in the pages that follow will help illustrate both the specificities of the thought of each individual thinker as well as the common thread of concerns which, albeit in different ways and in varying degrees, runs through all of them. And the common thread which runs through them is the discourse of Platonism, centered on the famous allegory of the cave in Plato's Republic.