2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
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.
English translation: “Unity without members is an empty mass; members without unity are powerless.”
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.
English translation: “It is not institutions that Europe needs. It is freedom.”
Rappard, a Geneva economist who had taught at Harvard, set out to explain a fact many Europeans preferred to explain away: that the United States enjoyed a material abundance no rival approached, and had done so well before two world wars widened the gap. Offered here in the 1955 English translation of his 1954 French study, and prefaced by Henry Hazlitt, the argument marshals figures on national income, population, and production before turning to observers from Adam Smith and Tocqueville to Mill. The wealth, he concludes, springs less from virgin soil than from labor and its productivity—driven by mass production, the marriage of laboratory and workshop, a sheer passion for output, and above all the spirit of competition that European cartels had smothered. Economic superiority, he cautions, implies no superiority of soul.
The United States are today by far the richest nation in the world because they produce by far the most wealth.
William B. Lloyd, Jr. crossed to Switzerland after the Second World War to answer a question historians of great powers seldom pose: how so small and cantankerous a nation, divided in speech and faith, had held itself together and at peace while Europe tore itself apart. Rappard's short preface to Lloyd's book honors the American for mining the arid minutes of the old Diet for an answer of real use. The secret, on Lloyd's telling, lay not in institutions but in temper—conciliation and mediation pursued with patience, a mutual defense accepted only with reluctance, and a neutrality upheld in the wider service of peace. In a few pages Rappard folds another man's inquiry back into the study of Swiss unity that had absorbed his own career.
Here in the heart of the Old World was Switzerland which, throughout the centuries, had succeeded in maintaining within her own narrow borders the peace that her infinitely more powerful neighbors had constantly striven for in vain.