William Rappard

Rappard was as a co-founder of the Graduate Institute of International Studies (now IHEID), Professor of Economic History at the University of Geneva, Rector of the University of Geneva in 1926,[1] Director of the Mandate Section of the League of Nations Secretariat[2] (and as a member of the Permanent Mandates Commission for all 18 years of its active life), and Swiss Representative at the International Labour Organization (ILO), as well as at the United Nations Organization (UN) and at the United States Embassy.

[7] During his time as Director of the Mandates Section of the League Secretariat, Rappard frequently clashed with General Secretary Eric Drummond.

He made a strong impression on President Woodrow Wilson and was highly influential in persuading him to choose Geneva as headquarters of the League of Nations beginning in 1920.

He made no apology for promoting the ideas of Von Mises, and the Austrian school, which held as its cardinal principle a return to laissez-faire unhampered free trade.

Hayek and others in Helvetic economic colony the issue seemed clearly a straight fight between the forces of totalitarianism and those of freedom and social liberalism.

The intellectual Mont Pelerin Society, criticised by Von Mises, which must be based, he said on the principles of free entreprise; but instead governments used Police power to solve problems such as unemployment, and the absence of social insurance.

Rappard was an internationalist who believed in human rights utterly rejecting the former Nazi and current communist regimes, which he had at once elucidated in a profound study, The Crisis of Democracy.

Furthermore, the League of Nations should be supported by permanent international institutions that could enforce a supra-national legal system to promote both peace and trade.

His ideas were directly inherited by Hayek and Friedman the leading political economists of the post-war era to influence American capitalism.

[citation needed] According to historian Susan Pedersen, he was "large, ruddy, curly-haired, and inveterately cheerful, Rappard looked like a Swiss farmer - but he was efficient, capable, and effortlessly trilingual... and had an expansive network of liberal internationalist friends.