Plato's allegory of the cave provides us with a useful conceptual framework in which to approach the major texts of German Political Thought; in other words, the tradition of German Political Thought is informed at a deep level by the discourse of Platonism. The message of the allegory of the cave is an eminently political one, inasmuch as it encourages the reader to go out into the world and to discover whether it is, in the Greek sense of the word, a kosmos or not. Whether this kosmos involves a model of an Ideal kind (as Plato argued), or remodelling or reshaping the world from within the individual (as the modern world since Romanticism has believed), is the biggest political decision we face in the future.