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Taking social relations into consideration allows us to be mindful of the life-world and the social system. A social relation should be intended as an emergent phenomenon of a mutual act, with an autonomous connotation that goes beyond those who implement it. At the same time, it can be traced back to referential semantics, as it exists within a framework of symbolic meaning, and to structural semantics, because it is at the same time a resource and a constraint for the social system. If these are the general foundations of the relational theory of society, adding risk to this perspective as a descriptive model has some distinguishing features. For example, as a dimension of everyday life it is a "neutral category." It is based on that "insecure security" whose results, positive or negative, will derive from the kind of balance established between "resources and challenges" or, as we claim in this paper, between "goals and means."

The author, first of all, undertakes to perceive and analyze the role that the metaphor of 'root' plays, as well as the discourse connected with it - 'rooted', 'root out' and so on - in order to examine the functioning of botanical metaphors in modern political theory. Ideological duality is here shown as, in equal measure but in different ways, fixed to the idea of the root of human existence or of the well ordered society - and an image of a tree in blossom, if it has grown out of this condition - in which it is a privileged possession, giving the right to 'radical' actions. The difference is found where one group advocates unconditional nurturing of the given root and the other one urgent necessity of replacing it with new one. As a conclusion, it is suggested that the abandoning of the floral metaphor could not only open up space for reasonable dispute about the questions that it was believed to answer, but also that this kind of retreat from the fascination with root could really be - radical.

The state of theorizing bearing on an explicit, contemporary, critical theory of society is first of all outlined. While contemporary conditions of scholarship are not promising in this respect, the potential of a distinctive critical theory of society nonetheless remains tantalizing. The mostly agreed, even if mostly only implicitly, core architectonic of critical theory is outlined as a foundation, though disagreements persist over the significance of the linguistic turn and context-transcendent versus context-immanent modes of theorizing. On the basis of the outline of the general architectonic, suggestions are made, pointing forward to the articles in the special issue, as to how the contemporary democratic focus of the theory offers inspiration for a more explicit, modern articulation. Such a theory would follow the lead of the first generation, but it would additionally take on board the multiple theoretical as well as social changes that have since occurred.