Benedetto Croce had also stressed the “work in progress” principle. It is a mistake to despair over ourselves, he wrote in 1947; we make that mistake because we have come to expect the world to be reliably benign, with everyone living a civilized and enjoyable life. When that fantasy is shattered, we feel like giving up. The reality, however, is that history and the human world are neither stable and good on the one hand, nor hopelessly tragic on the other.
