The Dialectics of Coffee: Contemplation and Community in European Cafés — Epoche C1
The received framing, and the schema that does not belong to it The claim under examination is that the European café — the London coffee house of the 1650s, the Parisian café of the 1680s, the Viennese Kaffeehaus of the nineteenth century — simultaneously supports solitary contemplation and collective intellectual life, and that this double function explains its historical importance. The claim is true, the evidence for it is good, and the framing usually wrapped around it is not. It is worth clearing away the framing first, because it obscures the mechanism that actually does the work. That framing presents the café as a dialectic in three steps: thesis, the individual seeking solitude; antithesis, the shared space drawing him into company; synthesis, a community that preserves autonomy. The triad is not Hegel's. Mueller (1958) traced its provenance and found it in Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus's 1837 textbook expounding German idealism to students, from which it passed into English-language summaries and thence into general use. Hegel himself brings the three terms together in that formulaic way only once, in the preface to the Phenomenology (1807), where he treats such a schema as a lifeless formalism and attributes it to Kant. Mueller counted the occurrences and showed the attribution to be a legend of the textbooks. So the essay's organising figure is borrowed from a popularisation of a philosopher who dismissed it. Nothing is lost by dropping it, because the historical record supplies something sharper. Solitude and sociability in the coffee house are not opposed terms requiring reconciliation. They are two consequences of one institutional feature: the house sells a seat rather than a conversation, and it sells it on an indefinite lease. What follows from that single arrangement is the subject of the rest of this essay — first the institution as it can be dated, then the theoretical account most often given of it, then the two lines of objection that account has attracted, and finally the mechanism and the one piece of laboratory evidence bearing on it. The institution, dated The English coffee house has a first instance. In 1652 a servant named Pasqua Rosée opened a shed in St Michael's Alley off Cornhill in the City of London, selling coffee, and by the end of the century such houses numbered in the hundreds in London alone. They were known as penny universities, the penny being the entrance charge that bought a seat, the house's newspapers and the right to join whatever was being discussed. Cowan (2005), the standard monograph on their emergence, reconstructs them from newspaper advertisements, satires, diaries and the records of the trade, and his central finding is a corrective one: the coffee house was not born egalitarian. It grew out of the sociability of the virtuosi — gentlemen collectors and experimenters with money and leisure — and it retained mechanisms of exclusion, informal but effective, throughout its heyday. Two things nonetheless establish that these were places of consequence rather than refreshment. The first is that the Crown tried to shut them. On 29 December 1675 Charles II issued a Proclamation for the Suppression of Coffee Houses, on the ground that they were resorts of idle and disaffected persons where scandalous reports against the government were devised and spread. It was withdrawn within days, in January 1676, in the face of protest and of doubts about its legality — a rare and instructive sequence, since a government does not attempt to suppress a beverage. The second is what particular houses became. Edward Lloyd's house in Tower Street, from the 1680s, was where shipping news was posted and marine insurance underwritten, and the modern Lloyd's of London descends from it directly; Jonathan's in Change Alley was where stock was dealt, and the London Stock Exchange descends from that. In Paris, the Café Procope opened in 1686 and became associated with the writers of the Encyclopédie , though it should be said that the vivid anecdotes attached to it — Voltaire's prodigious daily consumption and the rest — are largely undocumented later legend, and the sober claim is the institutional one: the house supplied a room where men of letters could be found reliably. Habermas's argument, which is more specific and gloomier than its reputation The theoretical account almost always invoked at this point is Habermas's, and it is usually invoked for the opposite of what it says. Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (1962; English translation 1989) argues that in Britain, France and Germany between roughly 1680 and 1780 there emerged a bourgeois public sphere — a domain of private persons coming together as a public to engage the authorities in debate over the general rules governing commerce and social labour. It is defined by its position: it mediates between civil society, the realm of private economic activity and the family, and the state. Coffee houses, salons and the German table societies were its institutional bases, along with the periodical press that circulated between them. Habermas gives that sphere three institutional criteria, and they are worth having exactly, since the essay's claims about melting pots turn on them. The first is disregard of status: discussion proceeded as if social rank were suspended, so that the authority of the better argument could assert itself against the authority of the person. The second is the domain of common concern: matters previously monopolised by church and state — the interpretation of culture first, then politics and economy — became objects of open questioning. The third is inclusivity in principle: the public was in principle unlimited, since anyone reading the same journals could join it, though in practice property and education gated entry. The crucial point for this essay is the shape of the book. It is not a celebration but a narrative of decline. Habermas argues that the same commercial forces that created