Johann Jakob Bachofen - Explorer of the Mother Right

"The Spartans’ supposed rejection of private property influenced the utopian ideas of Sir Thomas More and the Abbé de Mably and, much later, the communist philosophy of Friedrich Engels. For the eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Spartans’ subordination of their own individual interests to the good of the state offered a prototype for the ‘social contract,’ while the apparent licence accorded Spartan women constituted, for the nineteenth-century Swiss historian Johann Jakob Bachofen, the remnants of a once more universal institution of matriarchy."
http://globalpolitician.com/25669-western-civilization

http://www.myrine.at/Bachofen/bachofen_e.html