Aurelio Peccei (Italian pronunciation: [auˈrɛːljo petˈtʃɛi]; 4 July 1908 – 14 March 1984), was an Italian industrialist and philanthropist, who co-founded with Alexander King and first president of the Club of Rome, an organisation which, in 1972, produced The Limits to Growth report.
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Early life
Peccei was born on 4 July 1908 in Turin, the capital of the Piedmont region of Italy. He spent his youth there, eventually graduating from the University of Turin with a degree in economics in 1930. Soon thereafter he went to the Sorbonne with a scholarship and was awarded a free trip to the Soviet Union.
His knowledge of other languages brought him to Fiat S.p.A. Although under continual suspicion as an anti-fascist in the early 1930s, in 1935 a successful mission for Fiat in China established his position in Fiat management.
During World War II, Peccei joined the anti-fascist movement and the resistance, when he was a member of the "Giustizia e Libertà". He was arrested, imprisoned, and tortured. After 11 months in prison, he was freed in January 1945.
Business ventures
After the war, Peccei was engaged in the rebuilding of Fiat. He was concurrently involved in various private and public efforts then underway to rebuild Italy, including the founding of Alitalia.
In 1949, he went to Latin America for Fiat, to restart their operations, as Fiat operations in Latin America had been halted during the war. He settled in Argentina, where he was to live for a decade with his family. He realised that it would make sense to start manufacturing locally and set up the Argentine subsidiary, Fiat-Concord, which built cars and tractors. Fiat-Concord rapidly became one of the most successful automotive firms in Latin America.
In 1958, with the backing of Fiat, Peccei founded Italconsult (a para-public joint consultancy venture involving major Italian firms such as Fiat, Innocenti, Montecatini), and became its chairman, a position he held until the 1970s when he became honorary president. Italconsult was an engineering and economic consulting group for developing countries. It operated under Peccei's leadership, on the whole, more as a non-profit consortium. Italconsult was regarded by Peccei as a way of helping tackle the problems of the Third World, which he had come to know first-hand in Latin America.
In 1964, Peccei was asked to become president of Olivetti. Olivetti was facing significant difficulties at that time due to the profound changes occurring in the office machine sector. Peccei, with his foresight and his entrepreneurial vision, was able to turn the situation at Olivetti around.
But Peccei was not content merely with the substantial achievements of Italconsult, or his responsibilities as president of Olivetti, and threw his energies into other organisations as well, including ADELA, an international consortium of bankers aimed at supporting industrialisation in Latin America. He was asked to give the keynote speech in Spanish at the group's first meeting in 1965, which is when the series of coincidences leading to the creation of the Club of Rome began.
The Club of Rome
Peccei's speech caught the attention of Dean Rusk, then US Secretary of State, who had it translated into English and distributed at various meetings in Washington. A Soviet representative at the annual meeting of the United Nations Advisory Committee on Science and Technology (ACAST), Jermen Gvishiani, Alexei Kosygin's son-in-law and vice-chairman of the State Committee on Science and Technology of the Soviet Union, read the speech and was so taken by it that he decided he should invite the author to come for private discussions, outside Moscow. Gvishiani therefore asked an American colleague on ACAST, Carroll Wilson, about Peccei. Wilson did not know Peccei, but he and Gvishiani both knew Alexander King, by then Director General for Scientific Affairs for the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris, so Wilson appealed to him for information.
As it happened, King did not know Peccei, but he was equally impressed by the ADELA paper and tracked down its author via the Italian Embassy in Paris. King wrote to Peccei, passing on Gvishiani's address and his wish to invite him to the Soviet Union, but also congratulating him on his paper and suggesting that they might meet sometime as they obviously shared similar concerns. Peccei telephoned King and they arranged to have lunch.
The two men got on well from the outset. They met several times in the latter part of 1967 and early 1968, and then decided that they had to do something constructive to encourage longer-range thinking among Western European governments.
Peccei accordingly persuaded the Agnelli Foundation to fund a two-day brainstorming meeting on 7–8 April 1968 of around 30 European economists and scientists at the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome. The goal of the meeting was to discuss the ideas of Peccei and King on the global 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 (one of the great methodologists of planning studies), Alexander King, Hugo Thiemann, Lauro Gomes-Filho, Jean Saint-Geours, and Max Kohnstamm. According to King, within an hour they had decided to call themselves the Club of Rome and had defined the three major concepts that have formed the club's thinking ever since: a global perspective, the long-term, and the cluster of intertwined problems they called "the problematique". Although the Rome meeting had been convened with just Western Europe in mind, the group realised that they were dealing with problems of much larger scale and complexity—in short, "the predicament of mankind". The notion of problematique excited some because it seemed applicable at a universal level, but worried others, who felt that the approach was valid only for smaller entities such as a city or community. Saint-Geours and Kohnstamm therefore soon dropped out, leaving the others to pursue their informal programme of learning and debate.
Death and legacy
Peccei died on 14 March 1984 in Rome.
A biography was written by his long-time assistant, Gunter Pauli entitled, Crusader for the Future: A Portrait of Aurelio Peccei. It was published in 1987.
Works
Peccei wrote several books, including:
The Chasm Ahead, Macmillan, NY (1969), ISBN 0-02-595360-5
The Human Quality, Pergamon Press (1977), ISBN 0-08-021479-7
One Hundred Pages for the Future, Pergamon Press (1981), ISBN 0-08-028110-9
Before it is Too Late: A Dialogue with Daisaku Ikeda, I.B. Tauris (2008), ISBN 978-1845118884