What Cafés Did for Liberalism | Hacker News Reader

What Cafés Did for Liberalism

newyorker.com

27 pointspepys21 comments

Hint: not the kind of “liberalism” U.S. and Canadian “liberals” are referring to when they use the word.

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.

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.

> conducted by socialists, not liberals

A~=B

If you think the instigators of the Russian Revolution were also liberals, you are surely mistaken. They didn't care about the political question. Issues like representative government, suffrage and free speech were secondary issues to the real issues: How to protect the workers.

The design of the Soviet Union was a regime that would be owned and run by the workers (that's not how it ended up in practice, but that was the theory). They were not liberals, and scuffed at the idea of liberalism, blaming the liberal revolutions of the past century merely for handing the power from aristocrats to capitalists, but the worker remained oppressed.

The Russian Revolution is complicated. There was a "February" revolution in Feb 1917 that was loosely classical liberal, then an "October" socialist/communist coup d'etat that effectively subverted, or 'disrupted', the dynamic that had been going on for much of the previous year.

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.

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.

The article, in typical New Yorker form, is impenetrable. I admit I did not read very far into it.

I think they kinda conflate the two, even though classical liberalism is directly at odds with socialism[0].

[0]: https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/6a4cad6a3a0759ac3f25472...

Then again you are using the North American definition for left and socialist, because the North American liberals are neither of those two.

Edit: to be fair though, I wouldn't consider liberals of any definition to be left or socialist. They might have some left leaning positions on immigration or the environment, but due to their capitalist nature they can not be considered left.

? 'North American Liberals' are definitely 'left' and 'socialist'.

In the most popular, common use of the term 'Liberal' in north America 'socialist' and 'left wing' would be the most common substitutes.

The definition of liberal in North America is different to the rest of the world. Liberal is not left wing or socialist elsewhere.

And to confuse matters further, I imagine GP is saying 'left wing' and 'socialist' in NA are somewhat diluted compared to the rest of the world.

Yes, I agree, but your bit: " because the North American liberals are neither of those two." I inferred as liberal in the sense of what people are called, whereas I guess you meant to imply classical liberal, which I guess would be 'Libertarian' but even that label doesn't apply well in the US as it's a fairly populist movement.

Not really, I mean Bernie Sanders is not a Socialist since he doesn't want to nationalize any industries which is really the sine qua non of socialism. He is a Social Democrat. Actual socialists usually identify as Leftists instead of Liberals.

Social Democrats are definitely Socialists. That's fair game.

And if Bernie were Emperor for a while, he'd nationalize a few industries, surely. I can barely imagine would Trump would do if he could just make up the law as well.

wat? If they are the same, then why do they have different names? Get a grip. Social democrats have nothing to do with socialists.

Social Democrats are essentially socialists, which is why even the Wikipedia entry has it under 'a series on Socialism'.

There's barely a hard line between Democratic Socialism and Social Democrats.

Disagree. Bernie doesn't advocate socializing any industries. Even Medicare for All would leave hospitals and doctors as private employees. He isn't going out there saying we should have nationalized the Big Three car companies instead of giving them a bailout, or trying to nationalize the banks, or anything else. He's a social democrat, he wants a strong public safety net tied with private ownership of capital. That's a perfectly fine political position, but it's not socialism.

There's a huge difference between what one advocates as a position as a politician trying to get/stay elected in a two-party democracy, and what they'd be willing to force through if they were all-powerful.

As an example, do you think that, given the ability to enact whatever legal changes he wanted, Bernie Sanders would nationalize our telecommunications infrastructure? Or our health care system?

I don't have any specific, citable reason to think he would, but I think there's plenty of reason to believe they're things he might want to do.

Socialism was not a thing in the 17th and 18th centuries, though, and the cafes were just as socially important back then, as even this article hints. The cafes of that earlier period were essentially the concrete manifestation of the rise of a ("bourgeois") civil society in the modern sense, which tends to go together (and it did even more so back then) with loosely classical-liberal attitudes.

Edited: to reflect what the article actually says. Thanks for the clarification!

Did you read the article? He talks about the Russian Revolution, and cafés around the turn of the last century. He is not talking about the liberal revolutions of a century prior.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com