The making of a Schumpeterian economist: Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen

The paper explores the intellectual trajectory of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen. By reviewing his memoirs and the various interpretations of his work, it puts forward the particular conditions and circumstances that shaped Georgescu-Roegen's theoretical developments. His way from neoclassical consumption behaviour to the entropy law and the economic process was a very exciting intellectual journey. Born in Romania, having experienced four dictatorships in the 1930s and 1940s, he confronted with the problems of a rural, overpopulated economy. The paper shows that his practice in Romania was the rain that made grow the seeds planted in his mind by Schumpeter at Harvard.