Walter Fröhlich

Walter Fröhlich belongs to the third generation of the Austrian School, which was socialized in 1920s Vienna between law and economics and was equally at home in both worlds. Sources describe him as a "business lawyer" (Wirtschaftsjurist), that is, a specialist in the area where tax law, commercial law, and private law meet. His formative phase was interwar Vienna. As one of the first twelve members of the Geistkreis, founded in 1921 by Friedrich August von Hayek and Herbert Fürth, he sat down month after month with Felix Kaufmann, Alfred Schütz, Eric Voegelin, Max Mintz, and Emanuel Winternitz, later joined by Gottfried Haberler, Fritz Machlup, and Oskar Morgenstern. At the same time he was a participant in the private seminar of Ludwig von Mises, the second great centre of gravity of the younger Austrian School. From this period also comes an essay published in 1933, which Fürth later cited as a shared point of reference. After the Anschluss of 1938, Fröhlich emigrated to the United States and found a lasting academic home at the Jesuit Marquette University in Milwaukee. There he taught tax law and economics, edited the volume "Land Tenure, Industrialization and Social Stability" (Marquette University Press, 1961), and in 1959 published in the Vienna "Zeitschrift für Nationalökonomie" (Journal of Economics) on income determination and welfare, a deliberate return to the mouthpiece of the old school. In 1953 and 1954 he served as president of the Catholic Economic Association, founded by American Jesuits, which later became the Association for Social Economics. His ties to the Vienna diaspora held for life: in April 1945 Alfred Schütz organized a collection of money among the Geistkreis veterans for the Fröhlich family, who had fallen into financial hardship; in September 1961 Fröhlich travelled to the reunion of the Mises private seminar in Princeton for Mises's eightieth birthday. His work at Marquette echoes on in the Walter Froehlich Memorial Award, which is still presented each year to the university's best graduate in economics.