1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
In the winter of 1813, Austrian troops occupied Geneva, and a provisional government that 'governed nothing' found itself bearing the costs of another's army. Rappard reconstructs how the newly resurrected Republic financed its extraordinary military burdens between 1814 and 1816 — through Austrian war contributions, loans floated with the old Société Économique and private citizens, and a striking campaign of patriotic donations that drew gifts from children, rural communes, and Genevans abroad. His centerpiece is the wealth tax of September 1815, a progressive levy collected by secret honor declaration into a sealed 'coffre mystérieux,' a device whose novelty shaped later fiscal debate. Filling what he calls a strange gap in the history of a much-studied city, Rappard turns dry ledgers of loans and levies into a study of civic confidence under occupation.
Ce Coffre sera disposé de manière, à ce qu'on ne sache point, ce que le contribuable y versera.
Viewed from neutral, republican Geneva — a city shaped by religious refuge and small-state vulnerability — the League of Nations appears to Rappard not as one institution but as three uneasily combined: a League to execute the peace treaties, a League to promote cooperation, and a League to outlaw war. Across these lectures he weighs each function with an insider's candor, praising the Permanent Mandates Commission and the financial reconstruction of Austria while exposing the weakness of Articles 10 and 16, whose sanctions collapsed at Vilna and Corfu once Germany, Russia, and above all the United States stood outside. War cannot be outlawed, he insists, until an impartial legal alternative exists for every dispute; the Permanent Court, not coercive force, is the League's most durable achievement. He closes with an appeal for American participation.
As municipal law is the sole protection of widows and orphans, so is international law, in the last resort, the sole protection of small nations.
Self-determination and imperial collapse multiplied Europe's sovereign states after 1918, even as trade, production, and population bound them ever more tightly together — a contradiction Rappard makes the engine of his survey of postwar cooperation. He tracks the continent's lurch from three republics to thirteen, the rise of dictatorships he links to agrarian social structure, and the slow shift from coercion to negotiation marked by the Dawes Plan, Locarno, and Germany's admission to Geneva. He measures demography, coal, cereals, and tariffs with League statistics, and judges the machinery of peace — the Kellogg Pact, arbitration treaties, the Permanent Court — with a sympathetic skepticism, faulting a renunciation of war that lacks definitions and sanctions. The unresolved question, he writes, is whether brute force or international justice will finally govern a Europe too interdependent to stand apart.
The execution of the peace treaties is a secondary, an almost accidental, and essentially a transient function of the League.
Three movements organize a century and a half of Swiss constitutional history in Rappard's telling: the emancipation of the individual, the triumph of democracy, and the rise of the state. He begins with the great paradox — that the Helvetic Constitution imposed by French bayonets in 1798, with its liberty, equality, and unitary citizenship, came to shape modern Switzerland more than the old Confederation ever did — and traces the sequence through the Act of Mediation, the reactionary Pact of 1815, the liberal cantonal revolutions of 1830, the federal Constitution of 1848, and the centralizing revisions after 1874. The individual who freed himself from the aristocratic state, and then mastered it through referendum and initiative, ends by surrendering to a federal statism of tariffs, railways, insurance, and subsidies whose swelling debt Rappard reads as the measure of lost independence.
Pour triompher définitivement en Suisse, le libéralisme avait donc dû faire appel au moins libéral des arguments.
Written for American students in the Governments of Modern Europe series, this account treats Switzerland as a mirror in which the United States might study its own federal habits. Rappard traces the confederation from the 1291 forest-canton alliance through the Sonderbund War to the Constitution of 1848, which consciously borrowed American bicameralism even as Switzerland exported the initiative and referendum back across the Atlantic. He anatomizes the collegial seven-member Federal Council, the supremacy of the legislature, the tenacity of cantonal and communal loyalty, and the slow drift toward etatisme. Neutrality, guaranteed since 1815, he defends as a necessity rather than a virtue, and Switzerland's guarded entry into the League of Nations emerges as the cautious conduct of a small state reluctant to surrender its ultimate safeguard.
For Switzerland, to resort to a more modern metaphor, neutrality is the parachute which she will not abandon until international flying becomes safer.
Every government that gathered at Geneva professed the Cobdenite creed that commerce breeds peace; every government, called to concrete concessions, reached instead for the tariff, the quota, and the bargaining duty. Delivered as the Cobden Lectures at the London School of Economics in February 1938, these three lectures reconstruct two decades of League conferences—Brussels, Genoa, the bold 1927 resolution to halt and reverse the rise of tariffs, the wrecked London gathering of 1933—and ask why they failed. Rappard sorts the protectionist arguments by purpose rather than chronology, weighing infant-industry claims and agrarian defenses, and locates the deepest cause not in ignorance or private greed but in the fear of war, which drove nations toward autarky. From Geneva, he warns, no honest message of optimism can come.
Thus those who could, will not, and those who would, cannot.
Confident opinion at the turn of the century assumed democracy's advance was as irreversible as the tide; by 1938 Bolshevism, Fascism, and National Socialism had made that assumption look naive. Across six lectures given on the Harris Foundation at Chicago, Rappard defines democracy not by its etymology but by the paired ideals of liberty and equality, then traces its uneven rise from Athens through Britain, France, and his native Switzerland. He reads the three great dictatorships as offspring of the World War—Lenin's from defeat, Mussolini's from disappointed victory, Hitler's from Versailles and slump—and diagnoses the strain within surviving democracies as a crisis of parliamentarism rather than of democracy itself. The remedy he presses is unfashionable: a retreat of the state from economic life, without which self-government becomes an illusion.
Democracy thrives on peace, and dictatorships on war.
Why are peaceable peoples so thoroughly organized for war? Rappard, invited by A. Lawrence Lowell to lecture as a second war broke out, sets that paradox against the wreckage of the first peace. He follows the Wilsonian ideal of organized peace from the Fourteen Points into the Covenant's three great instruments—arbitration, collective security under Articles 10 and 16, and disarmament—and charts their erosion across the Geneva Protocol, Locarno, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, and the Disarmament Conference that Germany abandoned in 1933. The League could judge, he argues, but not police; the Aaland Islands were peacefully settled while Abyssinia was left to conquest. Behind each failure stands American abstention and, in Pascal's phrase, a justice never armed with force. His one remaining hope is federation.
Periodically, in the open air and by collective oath, the Swiss cantons swore their federal pacts anew—an institution Rappard studies under its German name, Beschwörung und Erneuerung der Bünde, from Rudolf Brun's Zurich charter of 1351 to its extinction in 1798. Born of one magistrate's fear of his enemies, the periodic public oath spread through the perpetual alliances and the Covenant of Stans until it formed part of Swiss public law. Then the Reformation turned a rite of unity into a confessional battlefield: Catholics would swear before God and the saints, the Reformed before God alone, and no formula could reconcile the two. The ceremony returned for a single day at Aarau, on the eve of the old Confederation's collapse—the oath, Rappard argues, being the very cement of the Eidgenossenschaft.
Une fois de plus les saints se dressèrent donc entre les Confédérés, non pour les bénir, mais bien pour les empêcher de renouveler leurs promesses de fidélité mutuelle !
Six and a half centuries of Swiss survival amount, in Rappard's reading, to one sustained experiment in mutual defense—and thus to a rehearsal of the problem the League of Nations and the United Nations inherited: how sovereign units, unequal in wealth and divided by creed, can shield one another without a common command. Prepared in English at Lionel Curtis's urging as an abridgment of his French Cinq siècles de sécurité collective, the book separates the law of the Swiss alliances—from the 1291 pact of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden through the Covenant of Stans and the Defensional of Wyl—from the messier facts of Morat, the Musso War, and the Catholic secession of 1680. Federalism, he concludes, reconciles unity with diversity, and stands as the alternative to anarchy.
It might delight the patriot to believe, but it would discredit the historian to assert, that the present Swiss federal state was born of the love of the Swiss cantons for each other.
The transformation of a loose league of sovereign cantons into a modern federal state in 1848 is the pivot of this centenary study, commissioned by Pro Helvetia and read here in A. Lätt's German translation of Rappard's French original of the same year. He works backward from the French invasion of 1798 through the Helvetic Republic, Napoleon's Act of Mediation, the restorationist Pact of 1815, the Regeneration, and the Sonderbund War, then dissects the charter the revision commission assembled in six weeks—the American-inspired bicameral Assembly, the collegial Federal Council, the deliberately weak Federal Court. Three forces, he argues, made the federal state: the need for national security, for free economic development, and for political liberty and equality. It was, he insists, no foreign import but the act of a nation.
Die Einheit ohne Glieder ist eine leere Masse, die Glieder ohne Einheit sind ohnmächtig.
Multilingual, mountainous, and federal, Switzerland struck many postwar observers as a Europe in miniature, standing proof that peoples divided by language and creed might still be bound together. Writing in 1950, Rappard measures that hope against the institutions hastily built between 1947 and 1949—the Economic Commission for Europe, the Brussels Pact, the OEEC, the Council of Europe, and the North Atlantic Treaty—and finds them frameworks for cooperation among sovereign states rather than the federation Churchill had gestured toward at Zurich in 1946. Swiss neutrality, he explains, forbids military alliance and counsels reserve; a united Western Europe without Britain he doubts, judging an Atlantic federation of free peoples, after Lionel Curtis and Clarence Streit, the likelier safeguard against Soviet power.
Ce n'est pas d'institutions dont l'Europe a besoin. C'est de liberté.