Christian Joerges passed away last July, aged 81.We have come to regard him as a 'doyen' of European Union law and of its economic law, in particular.As the thorough and informative interview, conducted by Agustn Menndez and Harm Schepel and printed in this journal, 1 demonstrates, however, understanding and theorising the significance of European Union law was only part of a broader scholarly perspective.It had solidified gradually when Joerges completed his doctoral dissertation in 1971. 2 Even though his worldview had roots in progressive Roman Catholicism, the project is congenial to the type of scholarship pursued by social democrats in the interwar period.It is about the political nature of markets ('markets as polities' was the provocative title of one of his later projects) 3 and the task to identify legal structures that permit peaceful resolutions of conflicts among competing social values, chief among them equity and efficiency.Much to his credit, Joerges was undogmatic enough to draw on a variety of sources in political and economic theory.Any source, short of Marx, seemed to be welcomed by him.From the outset, Jrgen Habermas's theory of the public sphere undoubtedly left an imprint on his intellectual outlook, 4 but likewise did Karl Polanyi's Great Transformation, 5 and the ordo-liberals to whom he sustained an ambivalent relation 6 that I, for one, was never quite able to resolve.Obviously, Joerges's scholarship never fitted squarely in the mould of doctrinal lawyers.The institutions of the political economy and political science played a far too important role for it to pass as 'solide Rechtsdogmatik'.Politically, his work was unmistakably committed to democracy and, subject to the condition of democratic legitimation, some form of socialism, broadly understood.At the same time, Joerges was liberal, but not so staunchly liberal that he could have joined forces with the likes of Ernst-Ulrich Petersmann.The social and democratic core of Joerges's jurisprudence merits emphasis, for it explains why he, who had begun as a scholar of private law and conflict of laws, developed an interest in
Alexander Somek (Mon,) studied this question.