August von Haxthausen

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.

August was the last of eight sons of Werner Adolf, Freiherr von Haxthausen, "a typical prosperous backwater planter," and the Baroness Marie-Anne Wendt Papenhausen, 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. 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 Karl 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."

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