The history of liberalism is inseparable from the history of coffee; Stalin, Hitler and Trotsky
Coffee houses first appeared in the West in the late 17th century, when liberal thought was first brewing, and multiplied in the 18th century when it turned into a movement.
Jurgen Habermas, the social philosopher who died last month, famously argued that coffee houses provided something radically new:
a third space, or “bourgeois public sphere,” separate from the state or the home where people of all social ranks could meet and engage in open discussion.
Coffee houses were far more conducive to enlightened conversation than the traditional gathering places, ale houses, for the obvious reason that coffee clarifies the mind while alcohol befuddles it.
Coffee houses also provided homes for the great liberal sages. Adam Smith drafted parts of The Wealth of Nations (1776) in the British Coffee House in London
and engaged in coffee-fueled discussions with David Hume in John’s Coffee House on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. William Hogarth drew cartoons of the inhabitants of coffee houses. James Boswell scribbled down snippets of his neighbor’s conversation.
The coffee habit found its grandest cultural expression in the cafes of Austria and Germany from the mid-19th century to the 1920s.
Not everyone who inhabited these palaces was a liberal: Stalin, Hitler and Trotsky were regular patrons of Vienna’s Café Central
Trotsky even got his mail delivered there.
Adrian Wooldridge Bloomberg Opinion.April 10, 2026
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