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Adrian Wooldridge
April 13, 2026 — 5:00am
London: Optimism is a fleeting commodity these days but there is one thing you can do to ward off existential despair: go to your local coffee shop and order a cup of coffee. Not only is relaxing over a cup of coffee a perfect therapy in troubled times; the world’s booming coffee culture is a sign of the health of the liberal order.
The history of liberalism is inseparable from the history of coffee. 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.
Coffee houses were not just places where people could gather to drink the newly imported dark liquid; they were debating chambers where people could test their opinions, “penny universities” where they could educate themselves, and social networking hubs where people of different classes could rub shoulders.
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 typically charged a small entrance fee but then provided their customers with everything they needed to engage in self-education and exchange opinions: a large table where you could sit for as long as you liked, with an array of pamphlets and periodicals.
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. This process of clarification was particularly true of the coffee of the 18th century, which tended to be extremely strong: served thick and muddy and, according to one consumer, tasting like “syrup of soot or essence of old shoes”.
Coffee houses helped to create the infrastructure of the emerging bourgeois social order. The City of London was the child of coffee houses – the London Stock Exchange was born in Jonathan’s Coffee House and Lloyds of London in Lloyd’s Coffee House. The great periodicals of the age, The Tatler and The Spectator, founded respectively in 1709 and 1711, were, in essence, coffee houses put on paper, stuffed with stories told over a cup.
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-fuelled 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 neighbour’s conversation. All this buzz added to the glory of a liberal and enlightened society.
The greatest coffee addict of the Age of Enlightenment was also the leading philosopher of the enlightenment. Voltaire drank up to 50 cups of coffee a day to fuel his prodigious intellectual production, drinking some of them in the Paris cafe Le Procope, whose other customers included, along with leading French intellectuals, American Founding Fathers Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, and 18th-century naval officer John Paul Jones.
“Nothing exhilarated his spirits so much as the smell of it,” a contemporary observed, “for which reason he had what he was about to use in the day roasted in his chamber every morning.”
The coffee habit found its grandest cultural expression in the cafes of Austria and Germany from the mid-19th century to the 1920s. These cafes were not so much coffee houses as coffee palaces – vast vaulted rooms that stocked the leading local and international newspapers and allowed you to linger all day.
Not everyone who inhabited these palaces was a liberal: Stalin, Hitler and Trotsky were regular patrons of Vienna’s Cafe Central, and Trotsky even got his mail delivered there. But the cafes were nevertheless “democratic clubs”, as Stefan Zweig called them, where Vienna’s intellectual aristocracy, the founders of the Austrian School of Economics, the lions of psychoanalysis, including Sigmund Freud himself, and the stars of the “young Austria” literary movement all thrashed out their ideas.
The case for the umbilical tie between liberalism and coffee is made perfectly by the Axis powers’ attempts to destroy coffee culture on the grounds of personal health (coffee was bad for you), economic health (coffee had to be imported) and social health (coffee promoted cosmopolitanism).
Mussolini denounced coffee houses as “seditious dens”. Hitler’s brownshirts smashed them up for being Jewish. Japanese thugs closed them on the grounds they were “American”. A 1941 Hitler Youth handbook declared caffeine a “poison” for young people. For incorrigibles who could not give up the habit, the state provided either decaffeinated coffee or coffee substitutes such as barley.
The Cold War was played out with coffee cups as well as cruise missiles. And, once more, the side of freedom and decent coffee won. The United States, which accounted for about half the world’s coffee consumption, created the International Coffee Agreement to stabilise both coffee prices and the Latin American countries that produced the precious beans. This did not work perfectly – several coffee-producing countries such as Cuba, Nicaragua and Colombia fell to Communism – but it prevented worse chaos, and the nationalised coffee industries of Cuba and Nicaragua certainly did not provide a model for socialist prosperity or even a regular supply of decent coffee.
The citizens of the Soviet Union and its satellites found it ever harder to find good coffee. When I first visited Leningrad in 1981 a waiter, holding two jugs, offered me a choice of coffee or tea. I repeatedly asked for coffee, only to get no response. I eventually asked for tea and he immediately poured me a cup. In 1992 the ailing Soviet Union reduced its coffee imports to zero.
The era of globalisation following the fall of the Berlin Wall was an era of coffee triumphalism, with coffee houses marching across the entire world, regardless of ideological barriers. China has been converted from a tea-drinking culture into a coffee-drinking one, at least among the young. The South Korean media has dubbed their country “the Republic of Coffee”, and Seoul boasts a higher density of coffee houses per capita than San Francisco or Seattle. In Japan, another coffee hotspot, some coffee bars host events where members of the National Diet make themselves available for direct questions from the public.
Examined over the brim of a coffee cup, the future looks surprisingly bright, despite the fragmentation of the global economy, the march of the autocrats, and Trump’s mismanagement of US power. Coffee prices have certainly been volatile: they reached their highest point ever last year, declined recently thanks to a good coffee harvest, but will undoubtedly rise if the war in the Middle East resumes. But nothing seems to slow down the coffee revolution: Coffee consumption is growing by 20 per cent a year in China and at a slower but still healthy pace in the West. Coffee culture is becoming ever more sophisticated, with independent stores springing up in small towns as well as big cities, and coffee aficionados mesmerising baristas with orders as long as doctoral theses.
Pessimists point out that numerous coffee-house customers are solipsists shielded from human interaction by their laptops and earbuds, and that China’s coffee culture is driven by consumerism rather than political radicalism. Yet Adam Smith kept his head down when he was writing The Wealth of Nations. And, for all their reluctance to talk about politics, young Chinese citizens are forming a habit of hanging out together, something forbidden in the Maoist days.
Coffee sometimes takes time to perform its liberty-promoting wonders. But whether by slow-drip, pour-over or French press, history suggests it promotes them in the end.
Bloomberg
