Today, the phrase ‘Social Market Economy’ is widely understood as a codeword for a prudent economic centrism. Its terminological predecessor, the ‘mixed economy’, now conveys the sense of an uneasy relationship between state and economy, in which corporatism and big government determine the balance between private and state enterprise. The Social Market Economy is more overtly capitalistic than this – a capitalism with an acceptable, human face in which greater emphasis is placed upon legal regulation as the means of identifying and achieving social objectives. Stated in this way, we have already lent the term a somewhat clearer profile than it usually assumes in the everyday discourse of journalists and politicians.