William Emmanuel Rappard

William Emmanuel Rappard was born on 22 April 1883 in New York City, the son of the Swiss embroidery merchant Auguste Rappard and Julie, née Hoffmann. After primary school in New York he attended the Gymnasium in Geneva from 1899 to 1901. He obtained a licentiate in 1906 and a doctorate in law in 1908 at the University of Geneva; in parallel, study visits between 1905 and 1909 took him to Berlin, Munich, Harvard, Paris, and Vienna. In Vienna, in 1908 and 1909, he attended the seminars of Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk and Eugen Philippovich, which shaped his approach to economics; he developed his historiographical programme under the influence of Carl Grünberg. In 1909 and 1910 Rappard worked as an assistant at the International Labour Office in Basel, in 1910 and 1911 as deputy professor of economic history in Geneva, and in 1912 as assistant professor of economics at Harvard. In 1913 he was appointed to the University of Geneva, where he held the chair of economic history until 1928 and the chair of public finance from 1915 to 1957. Twice he served as the university's rector (1926 to 1928, 1936 to 1938). As the official representative of the Federal Council at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, he secured the choice of Geneva as the seat of the League of Nations and Switzerland's accession while preserving its neutrality. Between 1920 and 1924 he headed the League of Nations Mandates Section, and from 1925 to 1939 he belonged to the Permanent Mandates Commission. In 1927 Rappard founded, together with Paul Mantoux, the "Institut universitaire de hautes études internationales" (IHEID), the world's first graduate school devoted solely to international studies. As co-director (1928 to 1951) and director (1951 to 1955) he gave the Geneva School its liberal character. In March 1934 he offered Ludwig von Mises a professorship in international economic relations, which Mises took up in October 1934 and held until his emigration to the United States in July 1940. Hans Kelsen, Wilhelm Röpke, and Michael Heilperin were also among Rappard's appointments; Friedrich Hayek gave guest lectures at the institute. This Geneva constellation carried a core of Central European liberal scholarship through the war. On 1 April 1947 Rappard opened the founding meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society, which Hayek had convened on Lake Geneva. A pragmatic liberal, averse to any dogmatism, he wrote numerous studies in economic and constitutional history, among them the early Swiss standard work "Le facteur économique dans l'avènement de la démocratie moderne en Suisse" (The Economic Factor in the Advent of Modern Democracy in Switzerland) (1912), "The Crisis of Democracy" (1938), and "The Secret of American Prosperity" (1955). He died on 29 April 1958 in Bellevue near Geneva. His name lives on in Geneva's Centre William Rappard, today the seat of the World Trade Organization.