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Simon Peter Gasser, 1676-1745.
Prussian Cameralist, and the first professor of political economy in Germany.
Gasser was administrator in Cleves. Rewarded by Frederick William I of Prussia with a chair of law at Halle in 1721.
Frederick William was interested in recruiting civil administrators from the universities. Gasser and Johann Peter Ludwig, the rector of Halle, persuaded the king to overhaul the study of economics in German universities. In 1727, Gasser was appointed to the first chair on economics in Germany - formally, professor of Oeconomie, Policey und Cammersachen, at the university of Halle (another chair was created that same year at Frankfurt-am-Oder for J.C. Dithmar). The Halle chair was initially housed in the prestigious law faculty.
Gasser selected the classic treatise of Seckendorff as the first textbook. In 1729, he published his own economics lectures.
Upon Gasser's retirement in the 1740s, the new king Frederick II ('the Great') of Prussia, who, unlike his father, disdained the 'science of farmers' and didn't believe it a fit subject for universities, relegated the Halle chair from the law faculty to the philosophy faculty, and appointed a relatively minor figure, Joseph Friedrich Stiebritz, a Lutheran theologian and professor of Hebrew, to the chair.
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