T iago S araiva . Fascist Pigs

If there were an award for the historical monograph with the cleverest title, Fascist Pigs might win, but this book delivers much more than a clever title. Relying on an impressive range and depth of sources, marshaling a thought-provoking argument, and using lively prose, Tiago Saraiva’s comparative study of plant and animal breeding in Fascist Italy, National Socialist Germany, and “New State” Portugal illuminates our understanding of the history of fascism and the history of science in the twentieth century. The overall conclusion is that if we look seriously at the policies and programs of these regimes, we discover that they were deploying science to advance their goals as an “alternative modernity.” Modern agricultural science was constitutive of fascism. While Saraiva recognizes specific variations within the general category of fascism, he is a lumper rather than a splitter, looking for similarities rather than highlighting differences. Two aspects of the comparison receive particular attention. First, Saraiva emphasizes that rootedness in the national homeland was crucial for all of these regimes—thus the Nazis’ autarkic economic policy and Blut und Boden rhetoric. Second, he emphasizes that each of these states embarked on campaigns of colonial conquest or (in Portugal’s case) revitalization. (Acknowledging that the question is historiographically fraught, Saraiva places German conquests in World War II in a colonialist framework.) The geographical comparison thereby becomes more than threefold, since it includes also German-occupied Poland and Soviet lands, the would-be Italian empire in Africa, and the longstanding but politically renascent Portuguese colonies of Mozambique and Angola.

Argument (complex analysis) · Economic history · Empire · German · Homeland · Modernity · Nazism · Political science · Rhetoric · Sociology · State (computer science) · Theology · Classics · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies