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revolution that for so many centuries has marched over all obstacles, and that one
sees still advancing today amid the ruins it has made (Tocqueville 2000, 6,
emphasis added).
By suggesting the impossibility of successful opposition, Tocqueville’s image of an
unstoppable democratic revolution is intended to elicit cooperation rather than resistance
on the part of educated classes. More generally, the spectacle dwarfs individual actors
(Wolin 2001, 161), something that prepares Tocqueville’s subsequent insight regarding
the waning influence of individuals in a democratic age.
With respect to America, Tocqueville paints a panorama in which the vast scope
of natural resources and land, as well as the relative absence of a past, enables Americans
to set about the task of building a new, modern civilization with an energy that is
unparalleled in human history.
The American inhabits a land of prodigies . . . Nowhere does he see any
boundary that nature can have set to the efforts of man; in his eyes, what is not is
simply what has not been attempted (Tocqueville 2000, 387-88).
The American spectacle is an image of the still-emerging modern world, one that is
characterized by a dangerously hubristic sense of almost unlimited possibility. Whether
Tocqueville writes about the irresistible force of the democratic revolution or the
unreflective dynamism of modern civilization, he deploys images that are intended to
give readers pause as they survey an awesome spectacle of powers far exceeding
individual human proportion. To return to the more general point, Tocqueville’s artistic
renderings of both tableaux and spectacle are intended to transmit not only the facts he
Convention