A STUDY IN THE SOURCES OF B. TRAVEN’S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY IN THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE

Abstract

This study presents a revisionist reading of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre by “B. Traven,” the pseudonymous 1927 German novel published in English in 1935. Contrary to the scholarly perspective uniformly evident in previous criticism, in which Sierra Madre is presented as evincing the unknown author’s implicit Marxist/collectivist political and economic ideology, the dissertation posits that the book endorses the American versions of Libertarian democracy and free-market capitalism. The dissertation argues that the actions of, and dialogue between, the central characters―especially as embedded in the novel’s elaborately-developed internal narratives― parallel and suggest the author’s familiarity with key tenets of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651), the second of John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689), and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776). Chapter One explores how past and contemporary Traven scholars have invariably approached the entire body of Traven’s fiction―including Sierra Madre―with political preconceptions that identify the major elements of those works as condemnations of such negative human impulses as greed, unbridled selfishness, and lust for money, gold, and material goods. Using extant Traven scholarship, the study demonstrates how free-market capitalism is often reflexively condemned in these same pejorative terms, despite its origin in Enlightenment principles such as social and religious freedom and individual liberty― the tradition of Classical Liberalism―derived largely from these three epochal texts. Drawing on both older scholarship and the recent work of Thomas Pangle and Timothy Burns as well as that of Jeffrey Collins, Chapter Two discusses how historians of ideas have drawn lines of influence from Hobbes through Locke to Smith and considers the documented dissemination of the ideas of these three philosophers in Germany during the (likely) years of Traven’s youth. Following the overview provided in Chapter Three of the principles that most distinguish the systems proposed by each of these three philosophers, Chapter Four examines passages from America’s founding documents and examples from early American case law and legal commentary suggesting that the precepts advanced therein similarly appear to have been derived from Hobbes and Locke, cognizant of Smith, and woven into the country’s framework in ways that fundamentally shaped American representative government and laissez faire economic policy. Chapter Five documents both verbal and substantive parallels in Sierra Madre consistent with Hobbes’, Locke’s, and Smith’s related views of civil governance and economics. Chapter Six examines in detail two of Sierra Madre’s embedded metanarratives, and the connecting episode that appears in between them, as allegorical embodiments of key principles drawn from Hobbes, Locke, and Smith.