Abstract
A heavily understated dimension of cosmopolitanism is the urban rural divide. This is particularly true in the context of modern economics, which emerged at the same time that the notion of cosmopolitanism was gaining renewed political significance. This paper examines how economic thought of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries directly influenced the socio-literary interactions of a “World Republic of Letters” and how writers such as Goethe used terms like “universal spiritual commerce” to valorize the role of the city in the making of a new modern world. The paper also describes how the rural was left behind in this global social project, including its special relationship to nature, which occurred at a time when scientific advancements were replacing the role nature played in everyday life. Using the example of the Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Fire of 2022, the article suggests that natural disasters, such as wildfires, remain dominated by an urban cosmopolitanism logic and that an updated “rural cosmopolitanism” is required to address the return of nature into geopolitics.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Manuel Montoya,
Theorizing Rural Cosmopolitanism: Modern Economic History, Urban Elites, and the Political Economy of Disaster Recovery,
66
Nat. Res. J.
304
(2026).
Available at:
https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/nrj/vol66/iss2/7
