3,801 works, 471 books, 3,267 articles, 60 other works, 3 awaiting classification, 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.”
American aid could keep Europe supplied—but what would enable Europe to pay its way again? In this 1948 article, William Emmanuel Rappard examines the Marshall Plan through the distinction between unequal wealth and an imbalance that makes exchange unsustainable. Reading the European recovery programme as both economic evidence and an appeal to Congress, he questions its optimistic forecasts and its evasions over repayment. His perspective places obligations on both sides of the Atlantic: European modernization and less fragmented markets require American willingness to admit imports. The article shows why food, fuel, machinery, monetary stability, and trade barriers belong to the same recovery problem—and why aid justified by political aims cannot by itself establish durable economic relations.
Why would a financially strained government offer its creditors higher interest? In this 1949 historical essay, William Emmanuel Rappard examines three Genevan debt operations of 1863 and 1866 that reversed the usual logic of conversion. Legislative debates and treasury accounts reveal what the higher coupons purchased: relief from repayment obligations or the retirement of depreciated securities. Rappard distinguishes these immediate savings from any lasting restoration of public credit, questioning arrangements that weakened creditors’ repayment expectations. His perspective brings contractual rights and political confidence into the calculation of fiscal advantage. The later resistance of institutional lenders to lower interest sharpens the tension: measures that ease a public budget can unsettle the relationships on which its borrowing depends.
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.”
High wages and competitive exports pose the explanatory puzzle of William Emmanuel Rappard’s 1954 article: what enables American workers to produce so much? Productivity names the result, he argues, without explaining it. His answer connects mass production to workers’ purchasing power and industrial research to the pressure of rivalry. Yet the large firms that finance laboratories also constrain competition—a difficulty he confronts through Galbraith’s account of oligopoly and countervailing power. Written for a congress of French-speaking economists, the article offers a European assessment of American economic performance without equating abundance with cultural superiority. Its distinctive interest lies in this double tension: competition may foster prosperity without resembling textbook markets, and greater material output need not make a civilization more desirable.
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.