Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism [Book Review

Abstract

In the current political climate, one may assume that the anti-intellectual, anti-expertise, anti-truth wave which is sweeping the globe, and that the rise of the far right necessarily spells an end for science-informed policy. The author of this book shows that this assumption is — for better or worse — misplaced. The author argues that agricultural science came to promote and embody fascist ideals in Portugal, Italy, and Germany in the early twentieth century. As a tool for engineering livestock and crops that would sustain and secure these aspiring empires, the author demonstrates how the organisms produced by scientists served to shape the narratives and politics of these regimes. The book begins with an introduction to the central premise of the book, which the author attributes to Canguilhem and Foucault: that biopolitics, the management and control of life, were central to fascism. The author then expands this account to encompass how new “techno-scientific organisms,” such as purpose-bred crops and animals, themselves interacted to promote and produce fascism. While biopolitics has understandably focused on human biopolitics in action under fascist rule, most infamously the Nazi’s experiment in human eugenics, the author develops an inquiry into the way that plants and animals informed and reinforced social change. The book is laid out in two primary sections. Section one, “Nation,” describes the national programs for Mussolini’s Italy and Salazar’s Portugal, and potatoes and the eponymous “fascist pigs” in the German Reich. The second section, “Empire,” focuses on the relationship between fascist techno-science and the imperial ambitions of each regime. Fascist Pigs offers more questions of science and politics than it answers, but in a style reminiscent of the opening book of a saga. This is an accessible and important book that I would recommend for students of science, technology, and society as well as political science, and to philosophers of science and historians.