Modernization, as a crucial type of macrosocial change, is an ambiguous and contested concept. Like the idea of social change itself, modernization is treated in two opposite ways in sociological theory. One characteristic of evolutionism, or developmentalism, dominant in classical nineteenth-century social thought, puts emphasis on its inevitable unilinear course and single final destination. Another characteristic—emerging from the critique of determinism, fatalism and finalism—assumes contingency, multilinearity and openendedness of modernization. It looks at modernization as a possibility rather than a necessity, as an achievement rather than a fate, and claims that whether this possibility is achieved depends on the actions, decisions and choices of the members of society plus the conducive circumstances for mobilizing and facilitating such actions. The contingent character of these actions and circumstances produces various trajectories and outcomes of modernization, in other words multiple modernities.

I take the latter perspective and in this chapter will attempt to apply to the analysis of modernization my general theory of social becoming as put forward in two books in the 1990s: one, a monograph by Polity Press, Cambridge (Sztompka 1991), and another a textbook of the sociology of social change by Blackwell, Oxford (Sztompka 1993). This very general model of social becoming has a number of implications that have been hinted at or formulated here and there in the rich literature on modernization. I propose to put these implications together in a synthetic picture by means of ten theses on modernization. Each could be elaborated separately, but here I will present a list, a sort of agenda for future research.

• Thesis 1. Modernization is the particular implementation of social becoming. Therefore, the inspiration for the theory of modernization can be found in one of the most important sentences in the history of sociology: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please, only in circumstances given to them, encountered and inherited from the past generations” (Marx 1964, 1968). Applied to modernization, “making history” means that the process results from the transforming potential of human agency, understood as a synthetic force ascribed to a society as a whole.