By 1930, Modernism had won a place in the establishment, including the political and artistic establishment, although by this time Modernism itself had changed. There was a general reaction in the 1920s against the pre-1918 Modernism, which emphasized its continuity with a past while rebelling against it, and against the aspects of that period which seemed excessively mannered, irrational, and emotional. The post-World-War period, at first, veered either to systematization or nihilism and had, as perhaps its most paradigmatic movement, Dada.
While some writers attacked the madness of the new Modernism, others described it as soulless and mechanistic. Among Modernists there were disputes about the importance of the public, the relationship of art to audience, and the role of art in society. Modernism comprised a series of sometimes-contradictory responses to the situation as it was understood, and the attempt to wrestle universal principles from it. In the end science and scientific rationality, often taking models from the eighteenth century Enlightenment, came to be seen as the source of logic and stability, while the basic primitive sexual and unconscious drives, along with the seemingly counter-intuitive workings of the new machine age, were taken as the basic emotional substance. From these two poles, no matter how seemingly incompatible, Modernists began to fashion a complete worldview that could encompass every aspect of life, and express "everything from a scream to a chuckle."