Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-g8jcs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T20:53:56.207Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Reports to the Club of Rome

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Nicholas Greenwood Onuf
Nicholas Greenwood Onuf
Affiliation:
Professor in the School of International Service, The American University.
Get access

Abstract

The Club of Rome was formed to publicize the contemporary human predicament—an unprecedented social pathology which, according to founder Aurelio Peccei, “is aggravated by the interrelatedness … of everything in the human system.” The Club has commissioned and accepted nine reports, the first and most famous of which is Limits to Growth (1972). This report's “Malthusian” viewpoint and popular format identified the Club with a controversial issue evidently unacceptable to many of its members, not to mention most economists and technologists. Subsequent reports, with one exception, have progressively retreated from that initial position by denying the predicament's resistance to serial solution. Instead, reports have taken refuge in conventional liberal nostrums and blindly asserted technological optimism. The debate on the future of industrial civilization brought to the fore by Limits deserves a better fate.

Type
Review Articles
Information
World Politics , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , October 1983 , pp. 121 - 146
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1983

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 These qualities are easily discerned in Peccei's books: The Chasm Ahead (New York: Macmillan, 1969), The Human Quality, and One Hundred Pages for the Future (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1977 and 1981, respectively).

2 Following Ludwig von Mises, I “employ the term ‘liberal’ in the sense attached to it everywhere in the nineteenth century and still today in the countries of continental Europe. This usage is imperative because there is simply no other term available to signify the great political and intellectual movement that substituted free enterprise and the market economy for the precapitalistic methods of production, constitutional representative government for the absolutism of kings or oligarchies; and the freedom of all individuals from slavery, serfdom, and other forms of bondage.” See Mises, von, Human Action (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 3d ed., 1966)Google Scholar, v. A classical liberal, von Mises neglects to mention the costs of liberalism, which are the subject of my essay.

3 Peccei (fn. 1, 1977), 60.

4 Ibid., 61.

5 Ibid.

6 See ibid., chaps. 4–6, for a short history of the Club of Rome.

7 This is Peccei's own description, ibid., 77. See generally 73–77.

8 The project proposal, entitled Quest for Structured Responses to Growing World-Wide Complexities and Uncertainties, was prepared by cyberneticist Hasan Ozbekhan, who later published a condensed version as “The Predicament of Mankind,” in Churchman, C. West and Mason, Richard O., eds., World Modeling: A Dialogue, II (Amsterdam: North-Holland Pub. Co., 1976), 11–25.Google Scholar

9 Prepared by a multidisciplinary team at the Bariloche Foundation in Argentina, the report, published under the title Catastrophe or New Society? A Latin American World Model (Ottawa: International Development Research Center, 1976), is undoubtedly too radical for most of the Club's members. Although it is not avowedly Marxist, the report's computer projections for the future begin with the premise of significant changes in global distributive policies by 1980, and the report proposes an ideal world society in which “production is determined by social needs and not by profit” (p. 25, emphasis in original). There may also have been objections to the report on technical grounds. Peccei states only that it was initially sponsored and supported by the Club, but carried out independently (fn. 1, 1977), 136.

10 The tenth report is Guernier, Maurice, Tiers-monde: Trois quatre du monde (Paris: Dunod, 1980)Google Scholar

11 Forrester's preliminary version of his dynamically modeled world system, presented to the Club of Rome in 1970, was subsequently published as World Dynamics (Cambridge, Mass.: Wright-Allen Press, 1971). The quoted words (from p. 2), bordering as they do on redundancy, betray the difficulty in finding a succinct verbal characterization of system dynamics.

12 Meadows, Dennis L. and others, Toward Global Equilibrium: Collected Papers and Dynamics of Growth in a Finite World (Cambridge, Mass.: Wright-Allen Press, 1973 and 1974Google Scholar, respectively).

13 Forrester (fn. 11), 14–16.

14 On “The First Decade of Global Modelling,” see Meadows, Donella, Richardson, John, and Bruckmann, Gerhart, Groping in the Dark (Chichester, England: Wiley, 1982)Google Scholar, for which the quoted words serve as subtitle.

15 The authors of Limits advert to an overshoot and oscillation model but choose not to develop it; see Meadows (fn. 12, 1974), 8. The Science Policy Research Unit of Sussex University, after replicating the Limits model, developed an oscillating population curve in some simulation runs by altering Limits's resource and population assumptions. See H.S.D. Cole and others, Models of Doom (New York: Universe Books, 1973), chap. 9.Google Scholar

16 In one of their simulation runs, the modelers adjusted resource consumption, agricultural yields, and pollution levels to reflect an annual 4% rate of technological change in each category secured at no cost; they found that overshoot and collapse were indefinitely forestalled. No other, more plausible, adjustments generated this result. Meadows (fn. 12, 1974), 510–24.

17 Birth control was possible but, by Malthus's reckoning, a vice—apparently the moral equivalent of war.

18 In their important rebuttal appended to the Sussex Group's critique, the authors describe themselves as Malthusians with a “humble view of the human capacity to solve all problems indefinitely.” See Meadows, Donella H. and others, “A Response to Sussex,” in Cole (fn. 15), 240.Google Scholar Insofar as the terms “Malthusian” and “pessimist” have a casual interchangeability, either label fits this distinctly post-enlightenment view of the human condition. The authors of Limits correctly perceive their critics as falling within the enlightenment tradition of human progress and perfectibility.

19 The resemblance is dismissed by Pavitt, K.L.R., “Malthus and Other Economists,” in Cole (fn. 15), 153Google Scholar, because collapse has physical causes in the Limits model; in the Marxist model, it has social ones.

20 The term “conjuncture” was presumably Trotsky's. Mandel develops its use in Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1978). Louis Althusser, hardly a Trotskyite, considers it “the central concept in the Marxist science of politics.…” See Althusser, , For Marx (London: NLB, 1977), 250Google Scholar (glossary prepared by translator and approved by author).

21 Marxists would naturally identify capitalism with only one part of industrial civilization. In Immanuel Wallerstein's view, however, capitalism is today's world economy and therefore subsumes state socialism. If the former collapses, the latter must also. Wallerstein, , “The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 16 (September 1974), 413–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22 Althusser's well-known use of the notion of the overdetermination of capitalist crisis (contradiction) to help solve the paradox (for Marxists) of “the accumulation of effective determinations” imposed by superstructural phenomena like national policies and international events and “determination in the last instance imposed by the economic” seems to us as ineffable as it is unnecessary when superimposed on the notion of conjuncture. Quotation from Althusser (fn. 20), 113; emphasis in original.

23 The range and intensity of responses is nicely revealed in Willem Oltman's interviews with a variety of Western intellectual leaders, including a number of economists. See Oltman, , On Growth (New York: Capricorn Books, 1974).Google Scholar

24 Among economists' critiques, the exemplar is Kaysen, Carl, “The Computer that Printed Out W*O*L*F,” Foreign Affairs 50 (July 1972), 660–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The exemplar of criticism on technical grounds, with additional useful epistemological, substantive, and normative observations, is that of the Sussex Group. See Cole (fn. 15).

25 Berry, , The Next Ten Thousand Years (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1974).Google Scholar See also Salmon, Jack D., “Politics of Scarcity versus Technological Optimism: A Possible Reconciliation?” International Studies Quarterly 21 (December 1977), 701–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26 As an alternative formulation, “a system in which the rate of growth of the major variables was proportional to their distance from their limits would show a smooth, gradual, stable adaptation to its growth ceiling.” Kaysen (fn. 24), 661–62.

27 The literature is voluminous. Especially interesting are comparisons of Mills's and other classical economists' views on growth; see Barnett, Harold J. and Morse, Chandler, Scarcity and Growth (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1963)Google Scholar, chap. 3; Pavitt (fn. 19), 137–58; Lekachman, Robert, “Mills, Malthus and Growth without End,” Dissent 21 (Fall 1974), 492–500.Google Scholar

28 Boulding, , “In the Shadow of the Stationary State,” Daedalus 102 (Fall 1974), 96.Google Scholar

29 Heilbroner, , An Inquiry into the Human Prospect (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), 84.Google Scholar

30 Ibid., 88–91.

31 Sigmoid curves of population growth and diverse other phenomena were very much in vogue fifty years ago. Apparently the model was based less on a theory of growth than on a simple realization that indefinite exponential growth was literally impossible; see Page, William, “Population Forecasting,” in Cole (fn. 15), 168–70.Google Scholar With the aid of mathematics, a common empirical generalization—albeit defensible only in probabilistic terms—could be expressed in a law-like fashion. Contemporary theoretical constructs for sigmoid population curves tend to be complex and multicausal.

32 The recent development of “a mathematical framework wherein discontinuous phenomena (especially abrupt changes in qualitative structure) can be produced from smooth causal processes” (fittingly called catastrophe theory), may duly change this situation. Holt, Robert T. and others, “Catastrophe Theory and the Study of War,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 22 (June 1978), 176.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The relevance of catastrophe theory has already been asserted for the Marxist model of material growth and transformation in Parijs, Philippe Van, “From Contradiction to Catastrophe,” New Left Review, No. 115 (May-June 1979), 87–96.Google Scholar

33 “Pretty” is Watson's, James D. term, used repeatedly in his widely read book, The Double Helix (New York: Atheneum, 1968).Google Scholar Scientists like Watson normally prefer the prettiest among alternative models, on the assumption that nature does also, until their research conclusively demonstrates otherwise. The double helix model of DNA triumphantly confirms the force of this assumption and its appeal in distant domains of inquiry.

34 The exemplar of radical criticism is Galtung, Johan, “‘The Limits to Growth’ and Class Politics,” Journal of Peace Research 10 (No. 3, 1973), 101–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The Bariloche project (fn. 9) was devised in the same spirit, as an answer to liberal assumptions about the distribution of planetary welfare.

35 In Mankind's model, “about 100,000 relationships are stored in the computer, as compared to a few hundred in other well-known world models” (p. 34).

36 For an overview by a chief developer of the model, see Hughes, Barr. B., World Modeling (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1980).Google Scholar

37 There is also a passing but provocative reference to “the norm stratum” (p. 54), which, while not modeled, is deemed crucial to social change in crisis.

38 In work providing the theoretical foundations of the model, Mesarović and others define hierarchy by requiring an order-of-magnitude difference in the size of units and a distinctive set of interactions within units. In their own words, “the vagueness of these two criteria (‘order of magnitude’ and ‘strength and type of interactions’) indicates quite clearly the difficulty in establishing a hierarchy of structures which can stand the test of time even over a short period.” Mesarović, M. D., Macko, D., and Takahara, Y., Theory of Hierarchical, Multilevel, Systems (New York: Academic Press, 1970), 31.Google Scholar

39 Mankind presents four typical growth curves (p. 8), one of which is the sigmoid or logistic curve of growth characterized by slow take-off, a period of exponential growth that seems to feed on itself, and a topping-out either because of the increase of structural complexity in the thing growing or because of limits in the growing environment. This curve, as well as its many near cousins, is found so frequently among individual organisms, biological populations, and social activities as to be a strong candidate for the curve of “normal” growth. See also fn. 31.

40 Because of the inclusive character of the five strata, the authors of Mankind, of course, assume that there is no environment, and thus no indeterminate range of system-environment relations. This strategy of inclusion by definition merely alters the form of the problem, not its substance. It is also hard to see how a “master plan,” or any other ranking device suggesting an origin outside the system, comports with a comprehensive conception of the system.

41 Tinbergen, , Shaping the World Economy (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1962).Google Scholar The Twentieth Century Fund affords established scholars an opportunity to present an up-to-date appreciation of particular social problem areas to interested lay audiences. Its objectives, though less focused or sustained, are not so very different from those of the Club of Rome.

42 Laszlo's, book, The Inner Limits of Mankind (Elmsford, N.Y.: Pergamon Press, 1978)Google Scholar, is subtitled Heretical Reflections on Today's Values, Culture and Politics.

43 Laszlo appropriated the phrase “inner limits” from Peccei (fn. 1, 1977), 194–95, but abandoned Peccei's partly materialist view that such limits are bio-physical as well as social and cultural.

44 But Baum, Archi. J., The Philosopher's World Model (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979), 53Google Scholar, regards interexistence as a “quantum-leap” in conceptual development.

45 Mankind is less an exception to this trend than appears from the large size of its team (42 collaborators, 21 consultants): most members were involved in technical model-related activities rather than in developing the conceptual foundations of the project or in drafting the report. Neither RIO nor Goals employs a formal model.

46 Mankind (p. 190) provides a useful illustration in connection with proposals for solar energy farms which would cost $20 to $50 trillion to develop on the requisite scale. Though the authors calculate the amortization of this astronomical investment to be 30 to 40 years, they do not speculate on its source.

47 These are Giarini's and not necessarily the authors' characterizations. His citations are: Rescher, , Scientific Progress (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Mensch, , Stalemate in Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1979)Google Scholar; Forrester, , The Changing Environment for Industrial Enterprise, System Dynamics Group, Paper No. D-2667–2 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979).Google Scholar

48 Giarini, and Loubergé, , The Diminishing Returns of Technology (Elmsford, N.Y.: Pergamon Press, 1978).Google Scholar Note the phrase “internal limits” to growth (pp. 8, 16), which is not to be confused with Peccei's “inner limits” (see fn. 43). Internal limits are precisely those built into a system of material growth that is dependent on the growth of technological possibilities, dependent in turn on material growth, and so on, in what may be shown as unstable circularity. See also a brilliant formal exposition of the parallel situation of the growth of science in Nicholas Rescher (fn. 47).

49 Illustrations of the first three tendencies are, respectively, North-South: A Program for Survival, The Report of the Independent Commission on International Development Issues under the Chairmanship of Brandt, Willy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1980); The Global 2000 Report to the President (Washington: G.P.O., 1980)Google Scholar; Simon, Julian L., The Ultimate Resource (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).Google Scholar Together, they illustrate the temper of current iscourse on the future and, of course, the fourth tendency.

50 Peccei attributes this increased pessimism, rather unconvincingly, to others as well: Gloomy views and forecasts were everywhere. Earlier, people had accused the Club of Rome—unjustly—of being alarmist; now, they were beginning to compete in pessimism …” (fn. 1, 1981), 55, speaking of the seventies.

51 Ibid., 134; emphasis in original.

52 Ibid., 173, 179–82.

53 See Kahn, and others, The Next Two Hundred Years (New York: William Morrow, 1976)Google Scholar, and Kahn, Herman and B, John, Phelps, , “The Economic Present and Future,” The Futurist 13 (June 1979), 202–22.Google Scholar By taking on Kahn and his associates at the Hudson Institute, the Club need not repudiate its other initiatives. On the contrary, the Club's network of study centers could help to counter a new project of the Hudson Institute entitled “Visions of the Future,” which is directed at high school students in the United States.

54 For a similar conclusion, though supported somewhat differently, see Braillard, Phillipe, “New Political Values for a World in Crisis: The Approach of the Club of Rome,” International Political Science Review 3 (No. 2, 1982), 240.CrossRefGoogle Scholar