to choose Geneva as headquarters of the League of Nations beginning in 1920. The headquarters of the World Trade Organization in Geneva, Switzerland (Centre William Rappard, built to house the International Labour Organization) and the Chemin William Rappard in Bellevue, Switzerland, have been named after him. Co-founder of and director of the Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva in 1927 with Paul Mantoux, the economic historian. Rappard, himself delivered the opening address on April 1, 1947 to the Mount Pelerin conference. Present were some of the world's greatest economic thinkers. 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. The old ideas of dogmatism and intolerance must be abandoned, so that markets can be open and free, he opined, able to function normally. There was a cluster of exiles from Fascism and Nazism who congregated on the free city of Geneva. Rappard brought visiting scholars, and classical liberals seeking intellectual freedom. To F.A. 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. Around Europe the march of state interventionism presented a problem for the administration of limited government. 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. Thanks to the generosity of the Rockefeller Foundation the Graduate Institute managed to survive the harsh economic climate of the 1930s. 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. People had little confidence in the way forward, he expostulated; a notion he later explored in Human Action (1949) by Von Mises. From 1920–25, director of the Mandates Division of the League at Geneva. And then he was a member of the Permanent Mandates Commission, 1925–29. He was also a member of the Swiss delegation to the League’s Assembly, 1928–39. From 1927–39, Rappard published a number of intellectual analyses on the international situation. Problems of Peace attempted to rationalise reparations and international conference system of diplomacy and the balance of power. And he was