Johann Jakob Bachofen (22 December 1815 – 25 November 1887) was a Swiss antiquarian, jurist, philologist, anthropologist, and professor of Roman law at the University of Basel from 1841 to 1844.

Bachofen became an important precursor of 20th-century theories of matriarchy, such as the Old European culture postulated by Marija Gimbutas from the 1950s, and the field of feminist theology and "matriarchal studies" in 1970s feminism.

[3] After having attended the Gymnasium,[3] Bachofen studied in Basel and in Berlin[2] under August Boeckh, Karl Ferdinand Ranke and Friedrich Carl von Savigny[4] as well as in Göttingen.

[10] Bachofen's 1861 Das Mutterrecht proposed four phases of cultural evolution which absorbed each other: There was little initial reaction to Bachofen's theory of cultural evolution, largely because of his impenetrable literary style, but eventually, along with furious criticism, the book inspired several generations of ethnologists, social philosophers, and even writers: Lewis Henry Morgan; Friedrich Engels, who drew on Bachofen for The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State; Thomas Mann; Jane Ellen Harrison, who was inspired by Bachofen to devote her career to mythology; Walter Benjamin; Carl Jung; Erich Fromm; Robert Graves; Rainer Maria Rilke; Joseph Campbell; Otto Gross; Erich Neumann and opponents such as Julius Evola.

[11] Because of his theoretical commitment to Marxist historiography, Friedrich Engels faulted Bachofen for regarding "religion as the main lever of the world's history" and therefore considered it a "troublesome and not always profitable task to work your way through [his] big volume [i.e. Das Mutterrecht]".

[14] In contrast to Engels and Durkheim, the American sociologist Carle Zimmerman criticized Bachofen's work for initiating a research paradigm in sociology that "completely divorced" the study of the family from history, replacing the "constant struggle between familism and individualism" with "imagination".

Westermark, and others, as "evolutionary cultists" and considered them to have "destroyed history as a fundamental study in social science" during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.