Josef Herbert Fürth

Josef Herbert Fürth was born on 12 October 1899 in Vienna, the son of the court advocate Emil Fürth (1863–1911) and the women's-rights campaigner Ernestine Fürth, née Kisch. His mother led the Austrian women's suffrage committee and edited the "Zeitschrift für Frauenstimmrecht" (Journal for Women's Suffrage); his father, who died young, belonged to the Vienna Social Policy Party. Fürth thus grew up in a liberal, middle-class, politically engaged Jewish milieu. From 1918 to 1923 Fürth studied law and social sciences at the University of Vienna. In his first semester, in 1918, he met Friedrich August von Hayek; together they founded the "Vereinigung Demokratischer Studenten" (Association of Democratic Students) as a counterweight to the German-nationalist student fraternities. Both received their doctorate in law in 1921. In the same year Hayek and Fürth were expelled from Othmar Spann's circle because they persisted in criticizing Spann's metaphysical economics. On the very evening of the expulsion the decision was taken to found a circle of their own: the Geistkreis. Fourteen young academics met monthly from 1921 onwards; by 1938 the circle had grown to twenty-four members, among them Felix Kaufmann, Alfred Schütz, Eric Voegelin, Walter Fröhlich, Friedrich Engel-Janosi, Fritz Machlup, Gottfried Haberler, Oskar Morgenstern, and Karl Menger. About half of the Geistkreis was at the same time active in the Mises private seminar, so that Fürth became the nodal point between the two central Viennese discussion forums. After Hayek's move to London in 1931, Fürth carried on the circle's organisation alone and compiled a complete list of participants and topics. In Vienna, Fürth practised as a lawyer between his doctorate and 1938. Through his connection by marriage to Gottfried Haberler, whose wife Friederike Kann was a sister of Fürth's wife Emma Paula Kaan, the network remained closely woven in private life as well. After the Anschluss, Fürth and his mother Ernestine fled to the United States in 1938. On the recommendation of Morgenstern and Haberler, he spent the years 1938 and 1939 as a special student at Harvard and then held a professorship in economics at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania from 1939 to 1943. In 1943 Fürth joined the staff of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in Washington, where he remained until 1966. He successively headed the Eastern Europe and Middle East section (1948 to 1952), the Western Europe and Commonwealth section (1952 to 1956), and the International Financial Operations section (1956 to 1957), became associate adviser in 1957, and served from 1961 to 1964 as adviser and associate economist of the Federal Open Market Committee. In 1949 he was a consultant to the World Bank, and in 1960 visiting professor of international finance at the International University of Luxembourg. In parallel he lectured from 1945 to 1950 at the Catholic University and from 1950 to 1966 as adjunct professor at the American University. After his formal retirement he remained on the research staff of the National Bureau of Economic Research until 1968 and a faculty associate in residence at the Foreign Service Institute until 1974. His work consists of numerous essays on international monetary policy, European monetary integration, and the theory of central-bank policy, alongside extensive correspondence with Hayek, Machlup, and Haberler, in which he kept the Austrian School intellectually alive in emigration. Fürth died on 6 March 1995 in Chevy Chase near Washington. His scholarly papers went to the Hoover Institution.