Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

In spite of the long and respectable pedigree of historical studies that have explored the relation between science and Nazism, to my knowledge there is no single work in history of science dealing with science and fascism more broadly.[15] When the word ‘fascism’ shows up in narratives produced by historians of science, it refers to singular fascist regimes (Hitler’s, Mussolini’s, or Franco’s), always taken separately.[16] This is surprising when we consider the large literature in European history that discusses fascism as a widespread phenomenon and as a historical concept in its own right.[17] As “the major political doctrine of world-historical significance created during the twentieth century,” fascism is undoubtedly an essential part of European modern history.[18] If every developed nation in the world with some degree of political democracy had some kind of fascist movement in the interwar years, the vast majority of European countries went a step further in their relation with fascism. Adding to the two canonical cases of Italy and Germany, where fascist movements seized power, we can’t avoid fascism when dealing with the political regimes of Dolfüss in Austria, Horthy in Hungary, Antonescu in Romania, Metaxas in Greece, Pétain in France, Franco in Spain, and Salazar in Portugal. There is, of course, no consensus in the historiography on the proper typology of all these different regimes. But independent of labeling them as fascist or not, historians agree that they all had significant fascist dimensions, forming what Roger Griffin describes as “para-fascism” and Michael Mann calls “hyphenated fascist regimes”: Metaxas’ “monarcho-fascism,” Dolfüss’ “clerico-fascism,” and so on.[19] Not only does the inclusion of the Portuguese case in this book present a national context normally absent from the history of science and the history of technology; in addition, it has the advantage of placing the argument in this wider context of Europe’s experience with fascism.[20] The Portuguese fascist regime is in many ways exemplary of dynamics common to those hyphenated or para-fascist cases. Also, the longevity of the Portuguese dictatorship (1926–1974) and the imperial dimensions of Salazar’s New State contribute decisively to make it a historical object to consider side by side with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Historians of science and technology commonly argue for more attention to their disciplines from those interested in general history, but historians of science and technology have been largely absent from the significant debates concerning the history of fascism. This book seeks to overcome that limitation by considering the connected experiences with fascism of three different countries.

In thinking about science and fascism it is worth considering how, in the last few decades, the historiographical status of fascism has changed from a temporal hiatus in which irrationality reigned into an integral part of the human experience with modernity.[21] Roger Griffin is the author who has most consistently argued for the need to perceive fascism as a modernist political ideology promising to counter the unsettling effects of modernization in which, as Marx put it, “all that is solid melts into the air.”[22] Taking fascist talk seriously, as Griffin does, makes it possible to identify a coherent political project of national rebirth promising a sense of transcendence and purpose to societies allegedly under the modern menaces of individualism, social anomy, alienation, and instability.[23] Breaking with the past, manufacturing new historical traditions, and imagining alternative futures were not gestures limited to the modernist artistic avant-garde.[24] Fascists also deserve to be counted among the modernists due to their radical and revolutionary commitment to national renewal, aimed at countervailing the acute sense of crisis of interwar Europe.[25] Whereas Mussolini insisted that “all the political experiments of the contemporary world are anti-Liberal,” Salazar, having considered “the great laboratory of the world today” (that is, in 1934), predicted “within twenty years, if there is not some retrograde movement in political evolution, there will be no legislative assemblies left in Europe.”[26]