Johann Jakob Bachofen
Johann Jakob Bachofen ( born December 22, 1815 in Basel, † November 25, 1887 ) was a Swiss legal historian, archaeologist and anthropologist whose work Matriarchy, the origin of modern theories of matriarchy.
Life
Johann Jakob Bachofen came from a wealthy family from Basel, whose wealth was based on publisher moderately organized silk ribbon weaving. He studied in Basel and Berlin in August Boeckh, Karl Ferdinand Ranke and Friedrich Carl von Savigny, and in Göttingen. In Basel, he earned his doctorate work De legis actionibus de formulis et de condictione and studied an additional two years in Paris, London and Cambridge. In Basel, he received in 1841 a chair of Roman Law. In 1844 he was elected to the Court of Appeal in Basel, but withdrew in 1845 from public activities back. His tomb is located on the Wolf God's Acre in Basel.
Work
In his major work published in 1861 Matriarchy Bachofen defended the thesis that modern society had developed in three stages. After that there was in the original form of the company, the " hetaerism " no laws or marriage, she founded entirely in the natural productivity of women. This was followed by a certain mother-right form of society which called Bachofen based on ancient Greek texts gynecocracy, and is now known as matriarchy. In this type of society according to Bachofen 's mother was the head of the family, as the descent was determined by the mother ( matrilineal ), according to which the mother had been revered as a life-giving goddess. Matriarchy was then overthrown by the men who established the Patriarchate in its place. The reason sees Bachofen and others, on medical progress, which would have enabled the first determination of paternity. Bachofen connects the mode of production with the respective social and gender order and postulated that women under the patriarchy of the hunter-gatherer society in the early agricultural society through the house near productive work again high power and importance found, so that a further matriarchy was historically possible.
From ancient Matriarchatsvorstellungen the Bachofen differs mainly in the assessment. While the ancient notions of women or slaves domination was now seen more as a legitimation of the existing order through comparison of caricature, and the gynecocracy was thus associated with violence and unrest, Bachofen are the Matriarchatsidee another positive character. After it was initially met with harsh rejection, the work of later attention was, inter alia, by Friedrich Engels, Lewis Henry Morgan, August Bebel and Edward Bulwer- Lytton, Ludwig Klages, Erich Fromm, CG Jung, and a major influence on the modern spiritual feminism and the modern matriarchy.
Bachofen's book Mother Right arose in the context of classical studies, which had just begun to establish itself in the modern sense. However, it Bachofen rejected the source-critical method and empirical approach on how it was represented in particular by Theodor Mommsen, and appealed for his work on intuitive analyzes of mythology and empathic understanding. So his work mainly based on the interpretation of Greek and Roman myths than reflection of the struggle between the matriarchal and patriarchal principles. From recent Bachofen research, especially the rationality of criticism with the situation at that time in Basel is associated: the based on the publishing system craft was supplanted by more modern methods of production, and Bachofen thus faced as citizens as well as representatives of a declining economic sector as representatives of a past world the rational modernization.
After a period of forgetting one Ludwig Klages Bachofen newly discovered, which became an important stimulator through him, who influenced the early 20th century, Rainer Maria Rilke and Thomas Mann, Otto Gross, Walter Benjamin, the antiquity researcher Jane Ellen Harrison and the poet Robert Graves, also the artist Wolfgang paals and the mythologist Joseph Campbell, but also radically right thinkers such as Alfred Baeumler and Julius Evola.