
What Cafés Did for Liberalism - pepys
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/24/what-cafes-did-for-liberalism
======
microcolonel
Hint: not the kind of “liberalism” U.S. and Canadian “liberals” are referring
to when they use the word.

~~~
sonnyblarney
Actually I think it is. What is described are basically socialists, left-
leaning types, which 'North American Liberal' generally describes.

These cafe folks are not so much 'classical liberals' (or maybe they are in
some sense), which is what 'Liberal' is in the rest of the world.

Though there is overlap.

~~~
Svip
The article is weird. Cafés did great things for classic liberalism. Just
consider Café Pilvax in Pest (now part of Budapest) in Hungary, which was
basically the epicentre of the Hungarian revolution in 1848 and where the
people who wrote the 12 Points regularly met.

But those were classic liberals and nationalists. Their 12 Points dealt with
political questions, not social questions.

The revolutions from the 1770s to around 1850 were political revolutions, and
dealt with the political question, usually lead by classic liberal thinkers.
The social question lingered in the shadows, like 1796's Conspiracy of Equals,
but it wasn't until the Paris Commune that this problem really sprung out into
the open as a question the needed to be answered.

The Russian Revolution is a social revolution moreso than a political one. And
definitely conducted by socialists, not liberals. So the choice of
'liberalism' in the article is weird.

~~~
pmalynin
The Russian Revolution is certainly not a social revolution but an economic
one. They went from have a dictator to having a dictator just under a slightly
different economic system. They continue to have a Tsar to this day.

~~~
Svip
All revolutions are economical. The American one is about taxes, and the
French is about well... taxes. But the answer to the question is what defines
them from being political or social. The Americans and French revolutionaries
of the 1700s thought the answer to this was more political freedom.

The Russian revolutionaries of the 1910s thought the answer was a social
regime. The fact that it did not end up as they hoped it would be, does not
change the fact that it was a social revolution. I considering the motivations
here for the revolutions, not so much the outcome.

