Notes on Coffee

Carl Schmitt and Jurgen Habermas are, without a doubt, the most (in)famous political theorists to come from Germany since Marx. (One might want to include Leo Strauss, but I don't think he wrote anything of substance on coffee.) As is well-known - many of us get our introductions to Habermas via his Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere - Habermas associated the development of the salons and coffee-houses with the development of the public sphere, located between the spheres of 'family' and 'state.' Coffee, for Habermas, was essential to the development of liberal, bourgeois and democratic politics.  Much less well known is that Schmitt also wrote on coffee, the bourgeoisie and liberal democratic. His assessement of coffee and liberalism is nearly the opposite of Habermas'. Their respective assessments of coffee present interesting grounds upon which to judge and compare the anti-liberalism of Schmitt with the pro-liberalism of Habermas. Interestingly, it is worth noting that Schmitt's notes on coffee (1947-51) predate Habermas' book on the coffee-house (orig. 1962) by over a decade and coincide with the end of Schmitt's internment and interrogations at Nuremberg. While Habermas engages in a lengthy -  if albeit surprisingly ambivalent - confrontation with Schmitt in the Structural Transformation, he does not cite Schmitt's notes on coffee (most likely because they were not widely available, even in Germany, until 1991).

Extracts from Habermas' Structural Transformation and a discussion of Schmitt's Glossarium notes on coffee by Jakob Norberg 'below the fold.'

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'Harrar': A nice cluster of towns in Ethiopia, now owned by a Starbucks nearer you

Following on from Mark's previous post, it seems the new dictatorship of mega-corporations is finally putting the nation-state, explicitly, in its proper place:

Now, Starbucks has begun to pursue trademark rights for its Ethiopian coffees – Sidamo, Yirgacheffe, and Harrar – despite those names describing geographic regions of Ethiopia that have been producing coffee for hundreds of years.  The Ethiopian government has objected to this...

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Eating at Gayatri's

1. This symposium was originally framed as a discussion of the utility or coherence of John Holbo's concept of "Higher Eclecticism", a concept that has, on the one hand, been favourably received by those who are suspicious of "Theory", that is, how "Continental philosophy" gets deployed, primarily, in literature and humanities departments and, on the other hand, rather skeptically by those, such as myself, who are inclined to see this concept as unintentionally operating in the context of the "Cultural Wars" -- that is, an attempt by certain political forces to close avenues of discussion, especially those that have attracted the attention of 'Continental philosophers' and their supporters in the United States.  Thus, in a sense, the debate is overdetermined: any questioning of "Theory" is bound to be interpreted as a contribution to the "Cultural Wars" and, thus, political rather than intellectual in orientation.

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