 As we’ve seen, the Laws undertakes to create a good city and to discuss political theory, ethics, psychology, and other topics relevant to the creation of such a city. This makes it very natural to ask what the relation between the Laws and the Republic is. The predominant view, until fairly recently, holds that the Republic is Plato’s statement of what the ideally best city is; the Laws, on the other hand, describes the city that would be best, given less optimistic assumptions about what human nature is capable of. This position has two variants, depending on one’s view of whether Plato at the time of the Republic thought that its political program was compatible with human nature. If one thinks that even at the time of the Republic, Plato thought that its ideal city placed too great demands on its citizens to be psychologically realizable, then one can hold that the Laws is entirely consistent with the Republic: they could, at least as far as their philosophical positions are concerned, have been written at the same  time.[15]  If, on the other hand, one thinks that Plato held that the city of the Republic was psychologically possible, even if difficult to realize, it is natural to see the Laws as the outcome of a change in Plato’s views about human  nature.[16]  The first view faces two challenges: