Josef Herbert Furth was born on October 12, 1899 in Vienna, Austria. His father, Emil Ritter von Fürth (1863-1911), was a lawyer and a member of Vienna's City Council, who pioneered in school and housing reform, while his mother, born Ernestine Kisch (1877-1946), was the founder and leader of the Austrian women's suffrage movement.

Furth attended schools in Vienna and graduated from the Gymnasium with honors in 1917, and immediately enlisted as a reserve officer in the Austrian army. After being severely wounded, Furth was discharged in 1918 and entered into the study of law and social sciences at the Universities of Vienna and Heidelberg, Germany, receiving his J.D. degree from the University of Vienna in 1921. After serving as a law clerk for a number of years, Furth was admitted to the Austrian bar in 1929. With the exception of one year (1931-1932), which Furth spent in the United States as a Rockefeller Fellow in Social Science, primarily studying at the Yale Institute of Human Relations, Furth practiced law in Vienna until forced to leave in 1938.

Immediately after being discharged from the army, Furth, together with friend Friedrich A. (von) Hayek (Nobel-prize winner in economics), founded the Association of Democratic Students in an effort to combat the increasing right- and left-wing extremism among Vienna's students. In 1921, while still students, Furth and Hayek formed an informal circle of young social scientists, most of whom, like Furth and von Hayek, later emigrated to the United States. This group, which met for 16 ½ years included such international scholars as economists Gottfried von Haberler, Fritz Machlup and Oskar Morgenstern, political scientist Eric Voegelin, sociologist Alfred Schütz, philosopher Felix Kaufmann, historian Friedrich Engel-Janosi, art historians Otto Benesch and Johannes Wilde, and mathematician Karl Menger.

In the fall of 1938 (shortly after Austria's annexation to Germany), Furth immigrated to the United States. He became a "special student" at Harvard during the year 1938-1939, after which he was appointed professor of economics at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.

In the spring of 1943, Furth was asked to join the staff of the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C. as an economic specialist, with the specific assignment of preparing Handbooks on money and banking for various European and Asian countries to be liberated by the Allied Forces. Three years later he became a permanent member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve Board, and in time advanced to Senior Advisor on international finance and associate economist of the Federal Open-Market Committee, the policy-making body of the Federal Reserve system.

In addition to his duties at the Federal Reserve, Furth was a part-time lecturer in economics at The Catholic University (1945-1950), The American University (1950-1968), the International University of Luxembourg (1960, as a visiting professor of international finance), and the School of Advanced International Studies of The Johns Hopkins University (1968-1969). In 1949 Furth was "seconded" to the World Bank to accompany the newly appointed U.S. Commissioner for Germany, McCloy, and brief him on West Germany's international financial problems and to write a report on these problems.

In 1966 Furth retired from the Federal Reserve and joined the Foreign Service Institute (whose economic division he had helped to organize) as Faculty Associate in Residence. After 1972 he served as Faculty Associate Emeritus, still being asked to give lectures on international finance and history of economic thought.

Furth was married to Emma P. Kann since 1929 and had two sons, Helmut F., a lawyer of Short Hills, New Jersey and New York, and Werner F., associate director of the Martin-Marietta Laboratories of Baltimore, Maryland. Furth died in Chevy Chase, Maryland on March 6, 1995.