The New International Encyclopædia/Hermann, Friedrich Benedikt Wilhelm von

HERMANN, Friedrich Benedikt Wilhelm von (1795-1868). A German political economist. He was born in Bavaria, and studied at the universities of Erlangen and Würzburg. His attention was early directed to mathematics and political economy. In 1823 he became privat-docent at the University of Erlangen; in 1825 he was called to the professorship of mathematics at the Gymnasium of Nuremburg; and in 1827 he became professor extraordinary of Kameralwissenschaften in the University of Munich. His great work, Staatswirtschaftliche Untersuchungen, which appeared in 1832, ranks as one of the most important contributions to German economics. In 1835 he was made member of the Royal Bavarian Academy of Science. He was inspector of technical instruction in Bavaria; in 1845 was appointed one of the Councilors to the Minister of the Interior; and in 1848 sat as a member for Munich in the National Assembly at Frankfort, where he was one of the founders of the so-called ‘Great-German Party,’ which opposed the rise of the hegemony of Prussia; in 1850 he assumed charge of the Bureau of Statistics, and in 1855 he became Councilor of State. He published a large number of pamphlets and papers on political, economic, and industrial subjects, and the annual reports which he published as head of the Bureau of Statistics entitle him to the rank of one of the founders of the science of statistics.