How to write an intellectual biography? This article does not aim to answer this thorny question, but lists the analytical and narrative options mobilized to write an intellectual biography of Wilhelm Röpke (1899-1966). This German economist was, just behind Friedrich von Hayek, the second most important figure of the neoliberal movement gaining momentum in the Forties and Fifties. He was one of the main founders of the Mont-Pèlerin Society born in April 1947 on the heights of the Leman lake. All its flaws notwithstanding, the biographical approach proved to be a valuable one. Röpke’s life has been reconstructed by using the tools of socio-history, transnational history and the social and cultural history of the commitments of the intellectuals. The purpose was to analyse an economic and sociological thought as the result of an interaction between the thinker who produced it, the scientific and intellectual context which made it thinkable, the ideological and political background which made it audible and the promotional apparatus which made it influential.