A Muddle of Normative Interventions: Coffee, Russia, and the Public Sphere

• In Event: The Communicating Vessels: Press and Public Opinion in Imperial Russia

Abstract

Jürgen Habermas famously argued, in his 1962 study Die Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, that the coffee-house culture of London was one of a number of critical stimuli to the development of a bourgeois “public sphere” in Europe, with the coffee house tradition in particular described as an outstanding example of the institutionalization of critical democratic culture. The applicability of the concept of the public sphere to 19th-century Russia remains controversial, with scholars tending to look to the Russian salon as as a possible analogue as a social institution, even as the degree of censorship and state control in Imperial Russia complicate comparisons to Western Europe. This paper, however, attempts to explore the role of the 19th-century Russian café as a candidate. Before any such claim can be explored, however, it is necessary to critically review the historiography of the coffee house used by Habermas in his analysis, which has often tended to be taken at face value in application to other contexts. I will therefore begin by contextualizing Habermas’ sources and the normative interventions they had served to make in English historiography and debates, before considering the facts of 19th century café culture in Imperial Russia and its relation to any emerging public sphere.

Author

• Zachary Murphy King, Bilkent U (Turkey)