1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
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.
Rappard defines the small state not by population, territory, wealth, or neutrality but by a single constitutional fact: exclusion from the League of Nations Council's permanent seats. That negative definition — Max Huber's 'Nichtgrosstaaten' — lets him read the League as both a rupture with old diplomacy and its continuation, since the nineteenth-century Concert of Europe had already married nominal equality to rule by the principal Powers. Article 4 of the Covenant, he argues, did not merely manage this hierarchy but legalized it, turning long-standing political inequality into open constitutional fact. Tracing the Paris negotiations, where Cecil defended Great-Power control and Wilson supplied democratic language, he shows why intermediate and aspiring states — Spain, Poland, Argentina, Brazil — made resentment inevitable, and why the weak came to prize law as both moral preference and practical necessity.
It is not unnatural, although it may give rise to cynical comment: the nations whose only material bond is a common lack of might are spiritually linked together by a common love of right.