Dartington Hall was built on a strong, companionate relationship between two complex, contradictory people. This chapter explores the paths that led Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst to marry and start Dartington, illuminating a rich early-twentieth-century landscape of philanthropy, humanitarianism, spirituality and international exchange. It shows how affective relationships fuelled far-reaching collaborative reformism. The chapter also gives an overview of Dartington between 1925 and 1945. It dwells on the Elmhirsts’ desire to combine local roots with international horizons (what Kwame Appiah terms ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’); explores the implications of this progressive experiment’s setting in the conservative county of Devon; traces the project’s trajectory from a small, independent-minded venture in the 1920s to one that, by the late 1930s, aimed to contribute to state-led social reform; and situates Dartington amid myriad other unity-seeking reform projects of the interwar period, from the New Deal to Mass Observation.

Patrick Glenn’s final writings on the idea and practice of the ‘cosmopolitan state’ might seem as something of a departure for the world-famous comparativist, but they are in fact strongly continuous with his earlier work, and all the more fascinating for that. For Glenn, comparative law was always a subject in part defined against itself. For it was as much an examination of what connects and integrates different legal doctrinal streams and systems as of what distinguishes and divides them. And so it was quite natural that he should finally come to study systematically the ever more powerful web of transnational and global connections and commonalities that make the contemporary state – in his words – ‘cosmopolitan’ rather than ‘national’. His investigation paints a powerful picture of a global cosmopolitan practice that, against the vision of stronger versions of cosmopolitanism, is not itself globally located; rather it is rooted in different state subsoils, linked together through a matrix of legal, institutional, and cultural factors. Yet the question arises how robust his confident defence of state-centred cosmopolitan attachments would be in the face of the very recent upsurge in a nativist populism for whom ‘cosmopolitanism’ is the pejorative label of choice.