Richard Ebeling is the Ludwig von Mises Professor of Economics and chairman of the economics department at Hillsdale College.
On April 1, 1947, 35 free-market economists, political scientists, philosophers, journalists, and businessmen met at the Swiss Alpine resort of Mont Pèlerin. They had been brought together by F. A. Hayek to found a society of classical liberals devoted to the restatement and defense of the principles of the free society. Among the attendees were Milton Friedman, F. A. Harper, Henry Hazlitt, Frank H. Knight, Ludwig von Mises, Michael Polanyi, Karl Popper, FEE President Leonard E. Read, Lionel Robbins, Wilhelm Ropke, and George Stigler.
The opening address was delivered by William E. Rappard, co-founder and director of the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. After welcoming the participants he reminded them that “economics” can be viewed either as a science concerned with objectively explaining how the market functions or as a policy that, based on scientific insights, proposes how men may more effectively arrange their social relationships to improve their circumstances. Rappard emphasized that:
Science cannot be liberal or illiberal. In a sense it cannot be anything but liberal. An economist as a scholar may be learned or ignorant, intelligent or dull, profound or superficial, but he cannot be liberal or illiberal. Rather, if he is illiberal as a man of science, that is, if he dogmatically and intolerantly denies the rights of liberty of thought without which there can be no true science, then he is not worthy of being called a man of science. Policies can however be liberal or illiberal. Most policies all over the world today are in fact illiberal and it is because we believe that they should be liberal that we are assembled here today. It is as economists in the second sense of that equivocal word that we are liberal. Or rather we are liberals by conviction, by faith, while most of us are by profession scientific economists.
The contemporary world had turned its back on the classical liberal, free-market alternative in favor of socialism, interventionism, and welfare statism. It was to begin “an intellectual, economic and political renaissance” for liberty that the Mont Pelerin Society was being founded, Rappard said. Because, he continued, “Unless the world has become completely mad, it must sooner or later come to realize and to admit the productive superiority of a society based on the principle of free enterprise.”1
The years between the two world wars were a dark time for the advocates of individual liberty, free markets, and limited government. The dominant ideologies had been socialism, communism, fascism, national socialism, interventionism, and political and economic nationalism in short, practically every imaginable form of collectivism.
The voices that spoke out against this trend were few. Among them, and one of the most articulate and influential, was that of William E. Rappard. He was an international man in an age of collectivism and nationalism, speaking in defense of global peace, free trade, and human freedom. His long-time friend and former colleague Ludwig von Mises considered him one of “the world’s foremost experts in the field of international political and economic relations.” Mises called Rappard’s 1938 book, The Crisis of Democracy, “the most powerful refutation of the doctrines of Communism and Nazism. There are but few authors whose judgment, competence, and impartiality enjoy a prestige equal to that of Rappard.”2 And Lionel Robbins, professor at the London School of Economics, considered Rappard to be “one of the truly great men of the interwar period.”3
Born in New York
William Emmanuel Rappard was born in New York City on April 22, 1883, of Swiss parents, his father working in the United States as a representative of various Swiss industries.4 William Rappard did his graduate studies in economics at Harvard University from 1906 to 1908. During the academic year 1908-1909 he did additional study at the University of Vienna in Austria-Hungary, attending the seminars of Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk and Eugen Philippovich von Philippsberg, two of the leading figures of the Austrian school of economics before the First World War. And from 1911 to 1913, he was an adjunct professor of political economy at Harvard.
In 1913 he was appointed professor of economic history and public finance at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. He also served as rector of the University of Geneva during 1926-1928 and 1936-1938. From 1917 to 1919, Rappard was a member of various Swiss diplomatic missions to Washington, D. C., London, and Paris, including service with the Swiss delegation to the peace conference in France that ended the First World War. He made a strong impression on President Woodrow Wilson and was highly influential in persuading him to choose Geneva as headquarters of the League of Nations beginning in 1920.
From 1920 to 1925 he was the director of the Mandates Division of the League for overseeing the administration of colonial territories lost by the Central Powers at the end of the war, and was a member of the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League from 1925 to 1939. From 1928 to 1939 he also served as a member of the Swiss delegation to the annual meetings of the League’s General Assembly.
But in the struggle for classical-liberal and free-trade ideals, Rappard’s greatest institutional contribution between the world wars was his co-founding in 1927 of the Graduate Institute for International Studies in Geneva, with Paul Mantoux, the internationally respected economic historian and expert on the industrial revolution. Rappard’s goal was to offer to international students “the most eminent specialists available. If these specialists are well chosen, not only for their intelligence and erudition, but also for their character, and if they are made to realize that their sole professional duty is to contribute to the progress of science through their own work,” then the Institute would have done all that it could to train a new generation of scholars and advance the cause of peace and freedom.5 Throughout the 1930s the Institute’s financial status was secured by the generosity of the Rockefeller Foundation.
Among the teaching staff at the Graduate Institute in the 1930s, along with Rappard and Mantoux, were Maurice Bourquin, professor of diplomatic history; Guglielmo Ferrero, professor of contemporary history; Michael A. Heilperin, professor of international monetary relations; Hans Kelsen, professor of international law; Mises, professor of international economic relations; Pitman Potter, professor of international political relations; and Wilhelm Ropke, professor of international economic relations. Each was internationally renowned as a leading contributor to his respective discipline, and several had found sanctuary at the Graduate Institute as exiles from Nazism and fascism in their own homelands.
Hosted Visiting Scholars
Rappard also brought to Geneva during these years an array of famous visiting scholars, many of them leading classical liberals, who would deliver lectures over a week; their lectures often were sponsored for publication by the Graduate Institute.6 Among those visitors were R6pke (before he joined the Institute’s staff), F. A. Hayek, Lionel Robbins, Louis Rougier, Quincy Wright, Luigi Einaudi, Eric Voegelin, Fritz Machlup, Gottfried Haberler, and Bertil Ohlin.7
The Institute also held a lecture program every summer from 1927 to 1939 on the topic of international peace and order. The lectures were published in an annual series under the title Problems of Peace. In 1938, to mark the Institute’s tenth anniversary, Rappard edited a collection of essays by the Institute’s faculty on the theme of The World Crisis, through which the world was then passing.8
In September 1939, days after the beginning of the Second World War in Europe, Robbins recalled his last visit to the Graduate Institute as a guest lecturer and said nostalgically: “How much of all that was most stimulating and inspiring in the period between the wars is typified in their lovely college by the lake. Long may it flourish, an oasis of sanity in a mad world, to preserve and advance the great principles of international citizenship for which it so conspicuously stands.”9 The Graduate Institute survived the war and continued to flourish after 1945, with Rappard as its director until his retirement in 1955. He died on April 29, 1958, a few days after his 75th birthday.
Three Themes
Throughout the interwar period Rappard’s writings focused on what he argued were three interdependent themes: (1) international order and collective security as represented by the League of Nations; (2) free trade and private commerce to depoliticize economic relationships and reduce international tensions; and (3) respect for the dignity of the individual and protection of his rights to liberty and property to assure a free and just society.
After the disillusionment with and failures of the League of Nations, Rappard’s fervent defense and support of it in the 1920s and 1930s may seem peculiar and misplaced in the context of more recent classical-liberal and conservative criticisms of concentrated power in international organizations. But it needs to be appreciated that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries many if not most of the free-market liberals considered private commerce and free trade as essential not only for enhancing the wealth of nations but for fostering peace by reducing to the minimum the intervention of governments in human intercourse.
As an extension of this, they also considered treaties and agreements among governments for the uniformity of law and contract to be essential for international trade and commerce. They believed that an international court to adjudicate disputes between nations would reduce the likelihood of war. And to prevent war some supported an international system of collective security, composed of a consortium of nations’ military power, to provide mutual defense against would-be aggressors.10
Even as principled an advocate of laissez faire and strictly limited government as Ludwig von Mises said in 1927 that “The [classical] liberal therefore demands that the political organization of society be extended until it reaches its culmination in a world state that unites all nations on an equal basis. For this reason he sees the law of each nation as subordinate to international law, and that is why he demands supranational tribunals and administrative authorities to assure peace among nations in the same way that the judicial and executive organs within each country are charged with the maintenance of peace within its own territory.” And he offered the hope that “a world super state really deserving of the name may some day be able to develop that would be capable of assuring the nations the peace that they require.11
Rappard wrote four books on the ideal, the practice, and the failure of the League of Nations.12 These were supplemented by various articles on the workings and reality of the League.13
Swiss Model
Rappard’s model of international organization for world peace was based on his analysis of the evolution of collective security in the Swiss confederation.14 Starting in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a coalition of independent states in the Swiss Alps began to be formed for mutual military assistance against external threats. It eventually incorporated most of the territory now known as Switzerland. The common policy was strict neutrality and noninterference in the affairs of surrounding countries (though many individual Swiss soldiers sold their military services to other governments in Europe). Switzerland was invaded and conquered by Napoleon in 1798. After the defeat of France by the Allied nations, Swiss independence and neutrality were once again recognized by the European powers. In 1848 a new federal constitution was established in Switzerland that was modeled after the U.S. Constitution, with two legislative chambers but no presidency because of the people’s suspicion of any concentration of power in one person’s hands.15
The Swiss federal authority had responsibility only for national defense and neutrality-based foreign policy issues. All other matters were strictly left up to the respective cantons and to the private citizens. The constitution was also imbued with the spirit of classical liberalism and economic freedom. “Freedom of trade, residence, conscience and worship, of the press, of association and of petition were guaranteed for all …. [A]ll forms of protectionism were condemned as being contrary . . . to the fundamental principle of equality before the law,” Rappard explained.16
The danger from concentration of federal power manifested itself, however, with the growth in socialist and interventionist ideas in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the 1874 revisions to the Swiss constitution the federal government was given socialist and welfare-statist responsibilities over both the cantons and individual citizens; those powers had increasingly come to threaten the liberty of the Swiss people. In 1936 Rappard expressed concern that what was developing was a form of “state socialism” and wondered if Switzerland was not on a road to serfdom: “How much further this economic anti-liberalism can be carried without seriously threatening the political liberalism to which the Swiss people are still firmly attached, is the great problem of the future.”17
In Rappard’s eyes, the League of Nations was meant to serve as an association of the countries of the world for purposes of mutual defense against violators of international peace, whether or not the aggressor was a member. The internal affairs of the member states were not subject to interference from the other members, though the hope was that those nations not yet wholly guided in their home policies by allegiance to liberty, property, and free enterprise would eventually see the benefits of establishing a regime of domestic freedom.
The peace treaty of 1919 that ended World War I had included the covenant that established the League of Nations. The new organization was assigned three primary tasks: (1) implementation of the terms of peace; (2) establishment of a system of justice through an international court to adjudicate disputes between nations; and (3) formation of an association for collective security to maintain the peace if one or more nations violated the territory and freedom of any of the member countries.
What was a new and important principle in the peace treaty, Rappard argued, was the insistence that no people may be ruled without their consent. This was reflected in the ideal of self-determination, under which individuals within geographical areas in Europe could determine through plebiscite whether they would be citizens of one nation rather than another or form their own independent national entity. In the case of Germany’s former African and Asian colonies this meant not outright annexation of these territories by one of the victorious powers, but supervision and oversight by the League of how they were administrated as a “mandate” by one of the victorious powers. The goal was to assure the rights of the people in these territories and possibly their eventual independence rather than permanent colonial control.18
The idea behind an international court of justice was that no claimant in a dispute was capable of objectively judging his own case. Instead, a court of internationally selected and respected judges would sit in the Hague in Holland, and member states of the League would obligate themselves to present their claims against and disputes with other countries before this judicial body and accept its decisions as binding. International law and justice would replace the costs and catastrophe of war in the settling of potential global conflicts.
Finally, the members would agree to support politically, militarily, and financially any necessary armed resistance that the League as a body might agree was required to repel and defeat an attack on one of the member states by an aggressor nation that had initiated international violence. The hope was that the threat of such collective resistance would serve as a deterrent against any nation contemplating disruption of the international peace.
The ideal for which Rappard argued was a world of peace, freedom, law, and order. The League was not and had not been planned to be a world government. For many classical liberals like William Rappard, the logical extension of limited national government was to develop the practice of international justice under law, the adjudication of national disputes before an international court, and an international policing against war and violence between nations.
A Different Reality
That was one version of the classical-liberal ideal. The reality was very different. Rappard was a dispassionate recorder of the League in practice. In violation of the peace concepts of 1919, governments either manipulated or prevented self-determination for peoples through plebiscites. They refused to recognize or respect decisions made by the international court at the Hague; indeed, governments tried to manipulate the selection of judges appointed to serve their national purposes. They filled League commissions, bureaus, and departments with members of their national bureaucracies both as a spoils system and to influence League activities. In the League’s General Assembly and ruling Council, governments instructed their representatives to vote in the service of their respective “national interests” rather than for the protection and improvement of an international order of freedom, justice, and peace. And finally, in the 1930s when imperial Japan, fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany began to violate international treaties and law through war, conquest, and annexation, the League members chose to follow not the idea of collective security, but policies of national armament and defense.19
Why had so many nations turned their backs on the potential and possibility for a classical-liberal world of freedom and peace? Rappard tried to answer this in three insightful monographs and a book, the latter originally delivered as a series of lectures at the University of Chicago.20
After the disruptions, dislocations, and destruction of World War I, the countries of the world had participated in numerous conferences in the 1920s and early 1930s at which it was pointed out that permanent economic stability and improved material prosperity could only be assured through renewed free trade, more open immigration, a safe environment for global private investment, and stable foreign exchange rates linked to gold. Instead the nations of the world practiced “super-protectionism,” with high tariffs, import quotas, export restrictions, foreign-exchange manipulations and controls, agricultural and industrial subsidies, redistributive welfare schemes, and domestic planning, often with the goal of creating national economic self-sufficiency. While governments may have given lip service to the ideal of economic liberalism, what they all practiced was in fact economic nationalism. Rappard explained this idea and policy:
Economic and political nationalism . . . are, however, so closely related one to the other that we can in no case avoid the necessity of defining the latter if we wish to fully understand the former. Nationalism, then, is the doctrine which places the nation at the top of the scale of political values, that is above the three rival values of the individual, of regional units and of the international community. . . . If we wished to define economic nationalism by its underlying purpose, we should say that it was a doctrine destined to serve the nation by making it not richer, but freer, by promoting not its material welfare, but its independence of foreign influences. Economic nationalism is the policy of national self-sufficiency.21
While Rappard pointed out the most extreme forms of economic nationalism were practiced in fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, it was the dominant economic policy in all the Western democracies as well. During the First World War, governments had introduced economic planning in the name of the war effort, gaining control or influence over many aspects of commercial and social life previously viewed as the exclusive domain of private choice, association, and enterprise. After the war, many groups desired intervention and planning in peace time; some because they thirsted after the ideal of social engineering, others because they wished their vested interests to be politically protected in the changed environment of the postwar period. Still others expected government to guarantee or provide employment and business profits or market shares. After the start of the Great Depression in 1929, the pressures and appeals for such policies only increased. It was said that the various forms of national intervention needed to be isolated from international market forces that otherwise might undermine them, an isolation for which the weapons of economic nationalism were applied.
Tool of Economic Warfare
In addition, the experience of the last war and the fear of a new war generated a general climate of political insecurity in which governments built up not only their military armaments but also their tools of economic warfare to assure domestic supplies of raw materials, agricultural produce, industrial commodities for military preparedness, and artificially manufactured substitutes for goods that might not be available during times of international conflict. “By economic armaments,” said Rappard, “we mean all those legislative and administrative devices intended to restrict imports and to develop domestic production with a view of reducing international interdependence. Economic armaments are the tools of economic nationalism.”22
Rappard tried to explain how this shift from economic liberalism to paternalistic government and economic nationalism had come about. He gave a concise answer in a lecture he delivered in the United States in 1936. After citing the individualist and antistatist rationale for the American and French revolutions and the political evolution of England, he noted:
In the latter half of the nineteenth century and up to the present day, the individual, having emancipated himself from the state and having subjected the state to his will [through the democratic process], has furthermore demanded of the state that it serve his material needs. Thereby he has complicated the machinery of the state to such a degree that he has again fallen under subjection to it and has been threatened with losing control over it.
[T]he individual has increasingly demanded of the state services which the state is willing to render. Thereby, however, he has been led to return to the state an authority over himself which it was the main purpose of the revolutions in the beginning of the nineteenth century to shake and break.23
Preserving the liberty that men still had and regaining the liberty that men had already lost was possible, Rappard argued, only with a reversal of state control over economic affairs through a return to economic liberalism, and with it a reduction in the powers and responsibilities of the state:
As we see it, the defense of democracy demands a return to greater economic freedom, without which no state, however organized, can give its citizens more than the illusion of governing themselves …. It is, therefore, not only because we believe private enterprise to be more creative, more progressive, more efficient, and consequently more productive of greater general prosperity than that of the state, that we venture to advocate a limitation of the latter. It is also because we believe that no state that has been allowed to become totalitarian in its activities can fail to become totalitarian in its claim on the subservience of its subjects. Our plea for more private liberty is, therefore, political no less than economic.24
For Rappard, the calamity of the Second World War was the inevitable outcome of the collectivist, nationalist, and socialist tendencies set loose during the First World War and that reached their apex in the 1930s. Whathope, then, did he have for the world that emerged from the second “Great War” of the twentieth century?
Dubious about the U.N.
In the immediate aftermath of the war, during a visit to the United States, he delivered a series of lectures in which he expressed little confidence in the new United Nations that had superseded the old League of Nations.25 Rappard argued that the United Nations was the product of a “victors’ peace.” It was designed and brought into existence by the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union before the war had even ended, and was controlled and dominated by them. The initial membership was restricted to those nations who had allied themselves with the Big Three in the war, and excluded neutral countries like Switzerland. The U.N.’s real power resided in the Security Council, in which five governments the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, and China—not only determined when and how military force would be used against the other nations of the world, but in which each also had a veto power that prevented any U.N. sanctions and actions against themselves. Any decision on which the Big Five could agree could be virtually imposed on the other members of the United Nations. It was an organization constructed for these five powers to be the masters of the postwar world.
In 1954 Rappard delivered a lecture in which he reviewed the attempt for global peace since the end of the First World War.26 In the post-World War II period, he said, global peace through the U.N. had been impossible not only because of the Big Five monopoly, but also because the two leading powers–the United States and the Soviet Union–held radically different conceptions of the meaning of “freedom,” “justice,” “self-determination,” and “peace.” Peace had depended on the two military alliances surrounding the United States and the Soviet Union. The worst fear was that a war would break out between these two camps, resulting in a nuclear calamity far more terrible than the other world wars of the century.
What was Rappard’s hope for the long run? He believed that eventually the Soviet Union would collapse from internal forces. He argued that however meager living standards may be under socialist planning compared to the West, any improvement would stimulate the Russian people to want an improvement in their political status as well:
[M]ay we not hope that, as they [Soviet people] become less indigent, they will become less subservient? And as they become more impatient of police rule and of censorship, may they not grow more skeptical about the myths on which their ignorance has heretofore been fed about the West, about its exploitation of the masses, about capitalism, and about its necessarily aggressive imperialism? . . . But even if it be deemed unlikely, it seems to me that the policy of the West should not dismiss it as necessarily untrue. Nothing is to be gained by acting as if the masters of the East were omniscient in declaring war to be inevitable and everything would be assuredly lost if we let ourselves be persuaded that they were as infallible as they are dogmatic.27
But besides any eventual internal collapse of communism in the Soviet Union, the West had to have its own ideal. In his last book, The Secret of American Prosperity, Rappard tried to explain to his fellow Europeans the lessons to be learned from the United States without forfeiting their own traditions and cultural contributions to the world.28 What underlay America’s technological superiority and productive strength, he said, was its spirit of free and open competitive enterprise, which created the innovations and material achievements that were the envy of the world. The secret of America’s success was human liberty, Rappard emphasized. The ideal of liberty had originally come to America from Europe. Europe now needed to relearn some of that lesson from America. If it did, a world of freedom, free trade, peace, and prosperity could become a reality, rather than only the classical-liberal ideal.
Notes
- William E. Rappard, “Address at the Opening Meeting [of the Mont Pelerin Society] on Tuesday, April 1st, 1947.”
- Ludwig von Mises, “The Secret of American Prosperity” [1955], in Bettina Bien Greaves, ed., Economic Freedom and Interventionism: An Anthology of Articles and Essays by Ludwig von Mises (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Foundation for Economic Education, 1990), p. 163.
- Lord (Lionel) Robbins, Autobiography of an Economist (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1971), p. 159.
- The following brief summary of Rappard’s professional life draws from Albert Picot, Portrait de William Rappard (Paris: Editions de la Baconnière, 1963) and Victor Monnier, William E. Rappard: Défenseur des Libertés, Serviteur de Son Pays et de la Communauté Internationale (Geneva: Edition Slatkine, 1995).
- Monnier, pp. 489-90.
- On the history of the Institute, see HEI: Quarantième Anniver-saire, 1927-1967 (Geneva: Institut Universitaire de Hautes Etudes Internationales, 1967) and HEI, 50:1927-1977 (Geneva: Institut Universitaire de Hautes Etudes Internationales, 1977).
- F. A. Hayek, Monetary Nationalism and International Order (London: Longmans, Green, 1937); Lionel Robbins, Economic Planning and International Order (London: Macmillan, 1937) and The Economic Causes of War (London: Jonathan Cape, 1939); Louis Rougier, Modern Political Mystiques and Their International Impact (Paris: Libraire du Recueil Sirey, 1935) and Modern Economic Mystiques and Their International Impact (Paris: Libraire du Recueil Sirey, 1938); Quincy Wright, The Causes of War and the Conditions of Peace (London: Longmans, Green, 1935); and Wilhelm Ropke, German Commercial Policy (London: Longmans, Green, 1934).
- William E. Rappard, ed., The Worm Crisis (London: Long-mans, Green, 1938).
- Robbins, The Economic Causes of War, p. 9.
- See Edmund Silberner, The Problem of War in Nineteenth Century Economic Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946); also, my article “World Peace, International Order and Classical Liberalism,” International Journal of Worm Peace, December 1995, pp. 47458.
- Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism: The Classical Tradition (Irv-ington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Foundation for Economic Education, 1996 [1927]), pp. 148, 150.
- William E. Rappard, International Relations Viewed from Geneva (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1925); Uniting Europe: The Trend of International Cooperation Since the War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930); The Geneva Experiment (London: Oxford University Press, 1931); and The Quest for Peace, Since the War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1940).
- William E. Rappard, “The League of Nations as an Historical Fact,” in Problems of Peace (London: Oxford University Press, 1927), pp. 18-49; “The Evolution of the League of Nations,” in Problems of Peace (London: Oxford University Press, 1928, pp. 1-45); “The Future of the League of Nations,” Problems of Peace (London: Oxford University Press, 1929), pp. 1-30; “The Beginnings of International Government,” American Political Science Review, November 1930, pp. 1001-16; “The League in Relation to the World Crisis,” Political Science Quarterly, December 1932); “Nationalism and the League of Nations Today,” in Problems of Peace (London: Longmans, Green, 1934) pp. 17-40; “Small States in the League of Nations,” Political Science Quarterly, December 1934, pp. 544-75; and “What is the League of Nations?” in William E. Rappard, ed., The Worm Crisis, pp. 36-59.
- William E. Rappard, “Switzerland and Collective Security,” Pts. I & II, The New Commonwealth Quarterly, March and June 1936, pp. 299-320, 53454; and, Collective Security in Swiss Experience, 1291-1948 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1948).
- William E. Rappard, “Pennsylvania and Switzerland: The American Origins of the Swiss Constitution” [1940], reprinted in Varia Politica: Publiés Réimprimés à L’occasion du Soixante- dixième Annniversaire de William E. Rappard (Zurich: Editions Poly-graphiques, 1953), pp. 31 6-38.
- William E. Rappard, “Switzerland and Democracy,” Fortnightly Review, September 1937, p. 297.
- William E. Rappard, The Government of Switzerland (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1936), p. 123. Rappard was more optimistic about Switzerland’s future after the Second World War. See his article “The Economic Position of Switzerland,” Lloyd’s Bank Review, December 1948, p. 32: “Still it would seem as if, in the struggle between liberty and equality which is going on all over the world, liberty were holding its own more successfully at the foot of the Alps than in most if not all other European states. In the sphere of economic policy, this makes for a larger measure of liberalism and for a stronger opposition to state control.”
- William E. Rappard, “The Practical Working of the Mandates System” [1925], reprinted in Varia Politica, pp. 163-80; “Human Rights and Mandated Territories,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, January 1946, pp. 118-23; and “The Mandates and the International Trusteeship Systems,” Political Science Quarterly, September 1946, pp. 408-19.
- William E. Rappard, “Why Peace Failed,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, July 1940, pp. 1-6.
- William E. Rappard, “The Common Menace of Economic and Military Armaments” [1936], reprinted in Varia Politica, pp. 76-100; “Economic Nationalism” in Authority and the Individual: Harvard Tercentenary Conference of Arts and Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1937), pp. 74-112; Post-War Efforts for Freer Trade (Geneva: Geneva Research Centre, 1938); and The Crisis of Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938). “The Common Menace” and Post- War Efforts were delivered as Richard Cobden Lectures in London in, respectively, 1936 and 1938.
- Rappard, “Economic Nationalism,” pp. 78, 83-84.
- Rappard, “The Common Menace,” p. 10.
- William E. Rappard, “The Relation of the Individual to the State,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, January 1937, pp. 216-18.
- Rappard, The Crisis of Democracy, pp. 267-68.
- William E. Rappard, “The United Nations as Viewed from Geneva,” American Political Science Review, June 1946, pp. 545-51; “The United Nations and Switzerland,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, July 1946, pp. 64-71; “The United Nations from a European Point of View,” Yale Law Journal, August 1946, pp. 1036-48; and “Collective Security,” The Journal of Modern History, September 1946, pp. 195-201.
- William E. Rappard, The Quest for Peace Yesterday and Today (London: The David Davies Memorial Institute of International Studies, 1954).
- Ibid., pp. 46-47.
- William E. Rappard, The Secret of American Prosperity (New York: Greenburg Publisher, 1955).