Founding the Club of Rome

It started with an encounter in 1967 with Alexander King, the Director General for Scientific Affairs for the OECD in Paris at that time. Peccei and King decided to organize a meeting on 7-8 April 1968 of around thirty scholars at the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome, to discuss their ideas about the global aspects of problems facing mankind and of the necessity of acting at the global level.

The meeting at the Accademia dei Lincei was not a success, partly due to the difficulty of the participants to focus on a distant future. After the meeting, there was an informal gathering of a few people in Peccei’s home, which included Erich Jantsch, Alexander King, and Hugo Thieman. The Club of Rome grew out of this meeting of minds and people who were focused on the same problem.

Perhaps more than any­thing else what helped the Club of Rome to get started was the will and perseverance of Aurelio Peccei, fully backed by Alexander King. Thus started what Peccei called “the adventure of the spirit”. He was fond to state that “if the Club of Rome has any merit, it is that of having been the first to rebel against the suicidal ignorance of the human condition”. Another quote by Peccei, in this respect, is particularly telling - “It is not impossible to foster a human revolution capable of changing our present course”.

The Club of Rome should be small, with not more than 100 members; it should not have much funding in order to preserve its independence; it should be apolitical but transcultural (in terms of disciplines and cultures); and, finally, it should be informal. In a sense, it should be a non-organization, and one that should be dissolved once its objectives had been reached.

The Club should be an interdiscip­linary group that would focus on the long term, not a group with a narrow vision which would look at things only from a certain disciplinary bias (irrespective of how deep the discipline is), or from the standpoint of a given country or region. It really needed to be transcultural.

It was decided to ask a group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to undertake a project for the Club of Rome. The projectshould describe the ‘World Problematique’ through a mathematical model that would be able to represent its various aspects and which could be used as a guide for future actions. The risky aspect for the Club of Rome was to want to have a mathematical model for the problems of the globe. The result was the publication