1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Rappard presents this study as a precise correction to Genevan Restoration historiography: diplomacy, constitutional change, and civic memory are already well illuminated, but public finance remains obscure. The omission matters because fiscal practice reveals how a revived republic actually survived.
This is a single-author lecture volume: six Williamstown Institute of Politics lectures on the League of Nations, framed by A. Lawrence Lowell’s foreword. Rappard’s scope is not a legal commentary on the Covenant but an institutional reading from Geneva, where a Swiss small-state perspective makes law, publicity, and judicial settlement appear as necessities rather than ornaments.
Rappard’s work is a single-author interwar study of European and international cooperation after 1918, ranging from Germany’s postwar condition and Europe’s changing economic position to peace pacts, the League Secretariat, and the League Council. Its central thesis is cautious but forceful: Europe is not being “united” by sentiment, constitutional design, or the simple triumph of idealism, but by the pressure of facts—economic interdependence, intellectual contact, and the insufficiency of sovereign states acting alone.
William E. Rappard’s L’individu et l’État dans l’évolution constitutionnelle de la Suisse is a single-author constitutional-historical study of Switzerland’s passage from the old Confederation through the Helvetic rupture, the cantonal revolutions of 1830, the federal settlement of 1848, and the democratic-centralizing development that culminates in the later nineteenth century. Its organizing device is deliberately abstract: Swiss constitutional history is read as a changing balance between the claims of persons and the power of public authority.
Rappard’s The Government of Switzerland (1936) explains Swiss constitutionalism as a historical equilibrium, not a transferable model. Written for American students, it presents Switzerland as a small counterpart to the United States: an old republic, a federation built from local sovereignties, a source of the initiative and referendum, and a plural society whose neutrality partly recalls American isolation. Its thesis is that Swiss government lives by negotiated tensions—canton and Confederation, liberty and protection, representative and direct democracy, neutrality and collective security.
William E. Rappard’s 1938 Cobden Lectures reconstruct the League of Nations’ frustrated campaign for freer trade after the First World War and ask why official unanimity in favor of liberal commerce produced almost no liberalization. His thesis is deliberately complex: the failure cannot be explained only by economic ignorance or special interests, although both matter. It arose from the contradiction between a world verbally committed to interdependence and a system of sovereign states made anxious by depression, currency disorder, debts, social dislocation, and above all the expectation of war.
Rappard’s 1938 Harris lectures diagnose democracy just as Bolshevism, Fascism, Nazism, and the League’s impotence had broken the nineteenth-century belief in democratic inevitability. His thesis is not that democracy is finished, but that its ideals are being tested by industrial complexity, mass administration, and war, while dictatorship has not yet proved that it can outlast success or the dictator.
Rappard’s essay reconstructs the interwar quest for peace as a movement from legal hope to political constraint. He does not dismiss arbitration, collective security, or disarmament as empty ideals; rather, he asks what kinds of conflict each instrument could realistically manage. The tragedy he traces is that states repeatedly endorsed universal formulas while preserving the discretion, reservations, and security anxieties that made those formulas fragile.
Rappard studies the periodic sworn renewal of the old Swiss federal pacts, the institution called Beschwörung und Erneuerung der Bünde. Though prompted by his wider interest in intercantonal order, the book is archival and constitutional: it follows charter clauses, Diet recesses, ceremonies, and quarrels over oath formulae. Its premise is that old Switzerland was not held together by sovereignty, but by sworn association, public memory, and repeated assent.
Rappard’s 1948 study reads Swiss history not as the unfolding of nationality, but as a long institutional experiment in mutual protection. Switzerland, he argues, began when Uri, Schwytz, and Unterwalden swore in 1291 to defend one another; across changing forms—alliances, confederation, federal state—the same functional problem persisted.
Rappard’s centennial study is not an article-by-article legal commentary, but a historical interpretation of the Swiss Federal Constitution as origin, settlement, and continuing process. Its guiding aim is explanatory: to understand why the constitution of 1848 became possible, what political transformation it enacted, and how later revisions altered the balance between liberty, democracy, federalism, and state power.
William E. Rappard’s 1950 essay explains for Swiss readers the sudden proliferation of European and Atlantic institutions after 1947. By reading the founding texts of the ECE, Brussels Pact, OEEC, NATO, and Council of Europe, it dispels the illusion that Europe has already become a federation. Its thesis is sober: Switzerland may welcome cooperation, but it should not abandon neutrality or mistake intergovernmental machinery for political union. The appended treaty texts are therefore not ancillary: legal wording becomes the evidence for political judgment.