Right-wing and left-wing readers embraced completely different aspects of Bachofen.

Evidence

Bachofen’s own confused nostalgia for the past struck a respondent chord on the right. So too did his romanticized view of nature, to which man should submit himself as an infant to its mother. Like the romantics, but unlike Briffault, he absolutized the spiritual differences between man and woman (which, Fromm admitted, did express a legitimate protest against the Enlightenment’s “liberation” of women to the status of bourgeois men). Baumler, Klages, and the other volkisch theorists reacted only to Bachofen’s naturalistic metaphysics, turning it in the direction of mystical Schwarmerei (gushing rapture). What they ignored were his psychosocial insights. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 337

Categorization

• XREF: The same-text-different-readings split recalls how the Institute analyzed reception — and connects to the reader’s knowledge of how texts get politically appropriated, paralleling later debates about Nietzsche’s reception.