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!