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.

Most importantly, he studied German law with his friend Jacob Grimm, now a professor who also lectured upon 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.

In particular, family documents he provided her gave her the impetus for writing her well-known novella Die Judenbuche (The Jew's beech, 1842), based on accounts of a real 18th-century murder upon the Haxtausen estates.

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.

Though his voyage was supported by the crown, it was hindered by Count von Benckendorff, head of the Russian secret police, who considered Haxthausen a potential threat to state security and had his activities monitored not only in Russia but after his return to Germany (fifteen years later he "was still being warned by his former hosts that he should break off his correspondence with Alexander Herzen").

[6] However, after the spring thaw in 1843, Haxthausen left Moscow for six months of travel in the provinces, accompanied by his assistant, Dr. Heinrich Kosegarten, and a young Russian interpreter provided by the tsar.

The trip include attending a service at the Blue Mosque; a visit to a Yazidi encampment; and a banquet in Tiflis organized by the viceroy of the Caucasus, Mikhail Semyonovich Vorontsov.

After some hesitation (caused partly by a feeling of betrayal by the Marquis de Custine, who had written a wittily hostile report on his visit to Russia a few years previously), he was received cordially by Russian society, including Konstantin Aksakov, Herzen, and Pyotr Chaadayev.