The Limits to Growth and Cold War Political Economy: Normative Structure in Global Systems Modeling

The Limits to Growth (1972), prepared by an MIT group for the Club of Rome, is widely studied as an ecological forecast. This article reinterprets it as a normative artifact embedded in the political economy of the Cold War. Shifting attention from empirical accuracy to the normative structure of its scenario design, the article argues that the World3 architecture constructs an implicit hierarchy of development trajectories: all growth-premised paths — capitalist or socialist — lead to collapse, while only simultaneous stabilization of population, industrial capital, and pollution avoids it. The analysis does not posit intentional political design; abstraction from property relations, class conflict, and geopolitical asymmetries instead converts ecological limits into a universal managerial problem with asymmetric consequences for competing systems. The article contributes to political economy, environmental governance, and science and technology studies by treating global models as knowledge artifacts that define the possibilities of governance.