There have been clubs and coffeehouses and salons. The sociologist Jürgen Habermas associates the seventeenth-century English coffeehouse with the rise of a “public sphere.” That was a place where people of all classes could talk about politics without fear of arrest. “What a lesson,” the Abbé Prévost said in 1728, “to see a lord, or two, a baronet, a shoemaker, a tailor, a wine merchant, and a few others of the same stamp poring over the same newspapers. Truly the coffeehouses . . . are the seats of English liberty.”
