Profile of Aurelio Peccei (1908-1984)

By Glenda Sluga | 2025

Important writings

• The Chasm Ahead, Macmillan, NY (1969), ISBN 0-02-595360-5

• Foreword The limits to growth. A report for the Club of Rome’s project on the predicament of mankind, New York 1972.

• The Human Quality, Pergamon Press (1977).

• One Hundred Pages for the Future, Pergamon Press (1981).

Aurelio Peccei, ‘businessman’, as an international economic thinker

A self-styled “businessman”, perhaps best-known as the founder of the Club of Rome, and the man behind the famous Limits to Growth project, which today is associated with the origins of global environmental governance, Aurelio Peccei was an international economic thinker. Peccei’s international economic thinking occurred at the intersection of vast business experience, sustained engagement with international institutions, and, in the 1970s, with the planetary idea.  The broader context of this intersection was a more general engagement with new economic ideas that could tackle global problems and questioning of growth for its own sake. Peccei’s engagement with the planetary was more than a reflection of that temporary trend, he was a significant agent of cultural change. By examining his agency, and his writing, it is possible to see the complex ways in which business thinkers engaged international organizations and their potential, and simultaneously saw themselves as public servants.

Years before Peccei sponsored Limits to Growth, he presented a lecture to the National Military College of Buenos Aires on the development and environmental challenges facing humanity – this was at a time when Argentina’s political system was already under the sway of the military. Fast forward to 1972 and Peccei was one of four speakers invited to the distinguished ‘Who speaks for the Earth?’ series organized as a prelude to the formal opening of the United Nations Human Environment conference in Stockholm—the first example we have of global environmental governance. By then, Peccei had a long business career behind him, working for Fiat in the Soviet Union and pre-Communist China before World War Two, in Latin America since 1949 for the Italian industrialist Gianni Agnelli, and as Vice-President of Olivetti. By the 1960s, he was also manager of Italconsult and helped to set up ADELA, a private investment bank that operated in Latin America to promote development – Peccei would celebrate the bank as the first ‘multilateral’ development bank. When Peccei established the Club of Rome, many of his members were also involved in this banking enterprise. However, the reason he had been invited to lecture in Stockholm, and the main spring to his engagement with international organisations, was his role in the Limits to Growth project, the famous product of which was the eponymous report authored by Donnella Meadows , Denis Meadows, William Behrens III, and Jorgen Randers, published prior to the conference, in March 1972, in over 30 languages. 

The Limits to Growth report eventually sold more than 16 million copies. Peccei celebrated its success as spawning ‘hundreds and thousands of conferences, articles and public meetings which give vitality to the debate it has set off in all continents in the space of a few months, and the participation in it everywhere of ordinary citizens of different conditions and convictions, show that this is not a case of a summit exercise; and that a movement of opinion, although still confused, is in the offing.’^[1] Peccei’s role in its publication was critical. He had obtained Volkswagen funding to pay Boston-based MIT researchers to develop data driven world-modelling. In effect the report was based on computer generated systems analysis that worked with 5 factors: population, food production, industrialization,  pollution, consumption of non-renewable natural resources. 

That said, Peccei held powerful and distinct ideas of ‘economic growth’, ‘industrial development’  and ‘population growth’ and their relationship. 

In his speech at Stockholm, Peccei was given the topic ‘Human Settlements’. His opening gambit was to depict a haunting neo-Malthusian ‘fictional’ vision of   ‘our planet … invaded by a species of voracious and what we would now call, polluting creatures… cunning and adaptive, and they imitated human beings in everything . . . Soon the original world inhabitants were in trouble because of this locust-like swarm of old and new population, and desperate conditions were brought about in many countries’ apocalypse ensued.’^[2] This was the apocalypse of 6 to 7 billion people crowding the globe by the year 2000 and all aspiring to the same quality of life as the developed world. Peccei warned that ‘if mankind keeps growing according to the present tendencies and the related forecasts, it will soon saturate the earth, and threatening to overshoot the physical limits of its supporting capacity, and finally collapse.’  The answer was the new optics of world modelling: ‘only by acquiring a greater insight into today’s human condition and world situation, and the interactions and interdependencies of every problem, event, and action with everything else in the Man-Society-Nature-Technology integrated systems can we hope not to become lost in the modern world complexities.’^[3]

In the setting of early 1970s environmental politics, Peccei did not shy away from a language of ideals, he argued the importance of having ‘the courage of Utopia’ as ‘the only way to be truly realistic. Realpolitik has become obsolete—we need a new Realutopie’.^[4]  He also pushed for technocratic internationalism; he was an advocate of the need to transcend ‘the cult of territorial sovereignty’ a ‘relic of a past epoch’ in an ‘age of space exploration and atomic energy’.  In an interview with the Dutch journalist Wilhelm Oltmans, he would explain:  

‘Man has to realize his responsibility as the true ‘cybernete,’ the pilot and helmsman, governor of ‘Spaceship Earth’ - which is at present drifting along dangerously. This is the true challenge to our generation. The longer we hesitate in recognizing it, the more reduced the options become for us and the next generations. With respect to our environment, we must prepare for self-restraint and self-discipline, and direct our knowledge and technology rather towards protecting nature, or what is left of it, and other forms of life, instead of overexploiting them. In the social, political, and economic order, we must see the collective good take precedence. Individual initiative and profit must become subordinate.’^[5] 

In Peccei’s related publications about his views and his life he placed as important and consistent emphasis on the environmental crisis that loomed if brakes were not put on specifically population growth in the Third World. He developed this view of how to control growth in the context of development ambitions for the world’s ‘have-nots’.

Fancying himself an ‘economist’, Peccei complained that the Stockholm conference official publication, Only One Earth, had a tendency to measure everything in terms of economics; but money, he asserted cannot be the only yardstick.’^[6]  In a later collection of talks published as One Hundred Pages for the Future, he emphasised that ‘”modern” economics has let us down…the current practice of economics is out of tune with the fundamental interests of humanity’.^[7]  

‘Economics—how many follies have we committed in its name!’, he warned; ‘only now are we beginning to perceive the illusions in which this faithless mistress has enfolded us, the traps economics has set for all who have idolized it: ‘it goes without saying that economic activity is a fundamental human activity—but it is being poorly managed.’^[8]   

In this same context Peccei offered himself , ‘a man of industry’: ‘I always say that if the terms of a problem are clear, even a mediocre manager can passably handle it. But if the terms of the problem are not understood, even the best of managers is bound to fail. Therefore, the first step is to let and lead people to see by themselves the complicated workings of the human system and its interactions with the ecosystem, so that they can progressively grasp at least the general directions in which our collective efforts should be guided.’^[9] 

Underlying Peccei’s general approach to international organisations was a belief that the environmental challenges facing humanity demanded radical, immediate action. Informal contacts and lobbying conducted by well-meaning, well-connected ‘private citizens’, rather than heavily institutionalised sites, would work best to finance breakthrough research and produce tangible policy results. The Club of Rome functioned as Peccei’s dematerialized alternative to the heavy institutional setups typical of international organisations -- a ‘collegio invisibile’, a network of ‘practical’ businessmen, loosely connected to national Clubs, and driven by Peccei’s wits and relying on his vast contacts with likeminded peers, bankers, experts and journalists. Its lack of transparency is precisely what worried so many critics of the Club of Rome at the time. But for Peccei, the intergovernmental character of the UN sacralised the nation-state to the detriment of practical achievements, making it sclerotic and hopelessly politicised. That assumption only grew in strength by the late 1970s as Peccei understood all successive international conferences post-Stockholm to have failed to meet the need for a radical redistribution of labour, output, and trade.  

Should we care what Peccei thought? Gunnar Myrdal, who gave the lecture that preceded Peccei’s at Stockholm made clear his distaste, attacking specifically Limits to Growth for what he perceived to be its careless use of data and realistic pretensions. However, despite its critics, Limits did have an impact, as did its world model legacy, which coopted another economics Nobel Laureate Jan Tinbergen to explore ‘whether and how global development is achievable in manners compatible with earth-keeping and social justice.’ Introduced by Peccei at the end of his Stockholm lecture, Tinbergen’s Club of Rome-funded project culminated in the 1976 report: Reimagining the International Order. 

On his death bed, in 1984, Peccei was said to have dictated an agenda for the end of the century, returning to his neo-Malthusian concerns about overpopulation and limited resources, in an increasingly complex world interconnected as much by its environmental challenges as by commerce and trade, which required new political philosophies, new institutions, and new methods of global governance. Mankind was faced with the need for radical alternatives, and solidarity across local, national, and global lines, if catastrophe was to be avoided whether nuclear war, a depleted biosphere, encroaching deserts and polluted air and water, or species extinction.   This text, like others that remain extant are the corpus of an influential international economic thinker whose ideas combined both radical views of economics, and conventional views of cultural difference, both indicative of a period of planetary thinking.

^[1] Aurelio Peccei, Quale Futuro: L’ora della verità si avvicina (Milan: Edizioni Scientifiche e

Techniche, 1974), 71.

^[2] In: Ward, Barbara et al (eds). Who Speaks for Earth? Seven Citizens Of The World On Major Issues Of The Global Environment. 1973, WW Norton & Co.

^[3] Ibid.

^[4] Aurelio Peccei, The Human Quality (New York: Pergamon Press, 1976), 165

^[5] In: Oltmans, Willem On Growth. 1974, Capricorn Books.

^[6] Aurelio Peccei, One Hundred Pages for the Future: Reflections of the President of the Club of Rome

(New York: Pergamon Press, 1981), 100.

^[7] Ibid.

^[8] Ibid.

^[9] In: Oltmans, Willem On Growth. 1974, Capricorn Books.

Reference anything from this site as:

Sluga, Glenda (2025) 'International Economic Thinkers-Profile:Aurelio Peccei', ECOINT IET Profile #13, available at: https://www.ecoint.org/post/profile-of-aurelio-peccei-1908-1984