August Franz Ludwig Maria, Baron von Haxthausen-Abbenburg (February 3, 1792, in Bökendorf, Prince-Bishopric of Paderborn – December 31, 1866, in Hanover) was a German agricultural scientist, economist, lawyer, writer, and collector of folk songs, best known for his account of conditions in Russia as revealed by his 1843 visit.
Life
August was the last of eight sons of Werner Adolf, Freiherr von Haxthausen (1744-1823), "a typical prosperous backwater planter," and the Baroness Luise Marianne von Westphalen zu Heidelbeck (d. 1793), who also had nine daughters. Born on the family estate in Abbenburg, Haxthausen was sent to the Warburg estate of his uncle, Baron Kalenberg, to be reared; there he received a traditional Catholic education in rural surroundings. Haxthausen studied in University of Halle, where he joined the Corps Guestphalia Halle in 1810. He completed his studies under the Bökendorf priest and at the mining school at Clausthal, where he studied until 1812. In that year the Haxthausen estates were affected by a peasant revolt against the Bonapartist Kingdom of Westphalia, a revolt that was "in some measure a rebuke to the dominant landed class" but that the Haxthausen family chose to interpret "as an act of defiance by true Germans against conditions created by the foreign domination," a view which strongly influenced the young August, who participated in the War of the Sixth Coalition against France. His activities at this time were recorded by his closest friends, the Brothers Grimm, with whom he shared a deep interest in popular legends and fairy tales, which he collected from his fellow soldiers and hoped to publish (selections of this collection were published posthumously).
He continued his studies at the University of Göttingen from 1814 to 1818. There he studied old German poetry under the philologist Georg Friedrich Benecke, and was introduced by the physiologist and anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach to the study of human beings in their total physical environment (Totalhabitus), not just their political or intellectual activities. Most importantly, he studied law with his friend Jacob Grimm, now a professor who expounded the teachings of Edmund Burke and Friedrich Carl von Savigny, which held that social processes could be described but not explained; "it required the student to seek the fundamental principles of a society in its historical and everyday existence. Under the influence of this school, legal scholars abandoned a priori speculations for fieldwork."
In 1819 he returned to inherit one of his family's estates at Bökendorf, near Abbenburg. He remained unmarried and continued collecting folklore and publishing folk songs. His niece Annette von Droste-Hülshoff frequently stayed with the family and came to work closely with August; the family documents he provided her gave her the impetus for writing her well-known novella Die Judenbuche (The Jew's beech, 1842). In 1843 he bought the neighboring castle of Thienhausen. August st von Haxthausen died on New Year's Eve 1866 at the home of his sister Anna Elisabeth von Arnswaldt (b. 1801) in Hanover. He is buried in the cemetery of Bellersen in Brakel.
Official career
In 1829 Haxthausen published a slim volume on land tenure called Ueber die Agrarverfassung in den Fürstenthümern Paderborn und Corvey und deren Conflicte in der gegenwärtigen Zeit [On agrarian relations in the princedoms of Paderborn and Corvey and their conflicts in the present time] in which he proposed repealing most of the Bonapartist legislation passed since 1806 in order to prevent land from becoming nothing more than a commodity like other forms of capital. His sophisticated antirevolutionary proposals and evident mastery of the new scientific methods of study of economic and social institutions (called Statistik) attracted the attention of the then Crown Prince and later King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who invited him to Berlin and offered him a stipend to conduct a similar analysis for all the provinces of Prussia. For the next decade, he spent each summer traveling throughout Prussia researching the provincial legislation pertaining to land tenure. He was particularly intrigued by "what appeared to be survivals of [an] ancient but non-Germanic tradition of communal peasant organization in those eastern regions once occupied by Slavic peoples." Haxthausen argued that such communes, or Gemeinden, could mediate between classes and between the individual and society, thus allowing integration "by custom alone and not through the legal machinations of meddling bureaucrats and revolutionaries."