The Victorian-Edwardian intellectual kinship network was based on the
mobilization of political and religious reform movements in a segment of the
upper-middle and upper classes, at a time when the state church was just being
disestablished and the universities wrested from clerical control. In a highly
class-stratified society, this set of intellectual dissidents from their class consti-
tuted a relatively small group which was drawn together socially and sexually
by intermarriage. The components of this group were of three main kinds:
wealthy Quakers (Moore’s family background, Russell’s by marriage); Evan-
gelicals (prominent in the Idealist movement); plus the reform wing of the
aristocracy (of which the Russells were the most famous family). For many of
these families it became traditional to send their sons to Cambridge, especially
to Trinity and King’s, where further intermarriages were promoted by sisters’
visits. Once numbers had gone beyond a critical mass, the inner group’s culture
began to drift in its own direction, away from the moral earnestness of its
members’ political origins. An elite organized within this elite in the form of
a highly selective discussion society known as the Apostles. The smartest
prospects were tapped with the help of former members who gave the prize
examinations or taught at the famous secondary schools. The group met
frequently to vie in producing wittily iconoclastic papers, surrounded by ritual
which made it self-conscious of its intellectual superiority and the achievements
of its predecessors (Levy, 1981). In this atmosphere young undergraduates such
as Russell (inducted 1892) and Moore (1894) were encouraged to emulate the
lineage going back to Tennyson and including their most famous teachers up
through Sidgwick and McTaggart.
Upon publication of Principia Ethica, Moore became idolized by the
younger Apostles. It was their later success that established his wider reputa-
tion, since they included Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, Leonard
Woolf—in short, the male members of the Bloomsbury literary circle which
formed soon thereafter. It is difficult otherwise to understand the adulation in
which Moore was held throughout the rest of his life. His work on ethics was
not strikingly original, and his later philosophy was mainly a negative reaction
against subsequent innovations. Moore became a Durkheimian sacred object,
symbolizing the ideal intellectual. He was structurally well situated for the role:
in the early 1900s he was the longest-active member of the Apostles, famous
for his frail, youthful good looks and his debating style, combining passion
and wit and even sexual tease (Levy, 1981: 213). This image of Moore con-
tinued even into paunchy middle age; once he was separated from the Apostles,
his passionate tone and his aura of avant-garde brilliance faded, but he re-
mained a symbol, the group’s preferred self-image.
In the 1920s and 1930s Moore turned to the defense of common sense.
Statements such as that my body was born sometime in the past, or that this
is a hand held up before my face should be taken as true; whatever the sophis-
The Post-revolutionary Condition^ •^733