Modernization in Crisis - from Talcott Parsons to Jürgen Habermas.

The article informs that the central idea of the paper is to revive sociological discussion of concepts of modernization and modernity in the context of the challenges facing now both East and West. The aim of their re-evaluation is not to cast the sociologist T. Parsons's theory of modernization away but to think about the modernization as about the source of tensions between life worlds and the pressure of economic and politic systems. Though modernization produces patologies in sociologist J. Habermas's sense, its meaning, steering and direction remains to be the central subject of the contest between social actors, mainly in the sphere of labour relations and social marginalization. The paper stresses the need to study of modernization from the microrsocial level, to rediscover individual and collective actors, and to observe recurrent conflicts between actors struggling for definition of meaning of modernization changes and for getting control over them.