Something pretty remarkable was happening in 18th Century Paris. In the city’s salons and coffeehouses, regular French citizens—not government officials or clergy—were shaping the future of civil society. These spaces gave common folk a place to share ideas, challenge each other, and think aloud about how society should work, all without the heavy hand of government or, for women especially, without the isolation of private, homebound life.
In a way, these spaces were early testing grounds for the kind of open, respectful conversation that keeps democracy alive. Today, civil discourse in the Western world—especially in the United States, has devolved into pure antagonism and animus, if a conversation is attempted at all. Those past Parisian gatherings can inform our present-day condition and suggest a way to repair our marketplace of ideas.
In the modern day, perhaps Starbucks, Seattle’s Best, or your local mom and pop café are the sites of discursive redemption!
But how did this develop in the first place?
Paris was an important hub for the Enlightenment because it highlighted the importance of rhetoric in human progress, at least the progress of civil society. But what do we mean by civil society? The historian Stephen Davis’s defines civil society as
Essentially, the term civil society refers to the sphere of uncoerced collective action, as opposed to individual action, on the one hand, and government, on the other hand. In other words, it is the term used to describe the total range of voluntary social institutions that derive from the free association and cooperation of
individuals in pursuit of a common interest, as opposed to the institutions of government, which ultimately rest on force. Thus, it includes clubs, unions and associations, firms, and a whole range of informal and ad hoc social institutions that are produced by repeated social interaction among individuals.
Generally, Salons and coffeehouses created (and can create) a new space for issues and conversations between the privacy of individual action or individual households and government. In the salons, issues of norms, mores, and human aspirations, reciprocally connected to the private and the public, could be discussed. Coffeehouses and salons exemplify the sphere of uncoerced collective action necessary for freedom, plurality, and civil discourse thrive.
As places where word and deed took center stage, salons and coffeehouses showed that civil society is not just a structure but an activity. These places, what Hannah Arendt calls "spaces of appearance" were vital for a vibrant political life. Salons and coffeehouses modeled pluralistic engagement—where difference did not mean conflict but participation in a shared world through dialogue. They supported deliberative action outside the state and market. This is a primary topic of the political philosopher Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition. Though written centuries after the Parisian enlightenment, I find it to be one of the best treatments for how discourse fueled the rise of civil society, not the other way around.
Perhaps a more direct treatment of the Parisian spaces of appearance comes from Jurgen Habermas, a 20th Century German philosopher who saw coffeehouses as the training grounds for civil society. For Habermas, coffeehouses and salons served as early laboratories of democratic discourse, laying the groundwork for modern civil society by enabling critique, consensus-building, and reflection beyond state and church control. Habermas celebrates these venues as civic spaces for rational-critical debate, where norms of equality, argumentation, and autonomy were forged.
Interestingly, the literal salons and parlors of Enlightenment provided an excellent metaphor for how discourse is perpetuated and how it, itself, can perpetuate the active listening and cognitive empathy that can come in handy in a marketplace of ideas. Kenneth Burke, the literary critic and prominent rhetorician, talked of such a “parlor” metaphor in his book, Language as Symbolic Action. He writes the following:
Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before.
You listen for a while until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance.
However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.
Civil society, in essence, is a coffeehouse or salon. We enter into it and can contribute only when we have listened well enough to know when to convey our thoughts and experiences to find the best way to think and act about something.
The coffeehouses and salons of Enlightenment-era Paris weren’t just trendy hangouts. They were places where real conversations happened, where people worked through tough questions together. Thinkers like Arendt and Habermas saw them as the birthplace of democratic dialogue—the marketplace of ideas—where talk wasn’t just noise but a way to build something bigger than ourselves. Burke’s parlor metaphor reminds us that we are all stepping into a conversation that started long before us and will keep going after we leave. If we want a healthy civil society today, maybe we need to look back to yesterday. Maybe we need more spaces—physical or virtual—where people can listen, speak, and share without shouting each other down. The spirit of those Parisian cafes may be exactly what we’re missing.