Praxis Circle Contributor Charles Murray is a political scientist, author, and scholar whose work examines American social policy, class, education, intelligence, culture, and the institutions that sustain a free society. Over the course of his career, Murray has become an influential—and at times controversial—voice in debates about the forces shaping American society. Praxis Circle interviewed Charles because of expertise on socioeconomic issues and, more recently, his personal journey towards Christianity.
Born and raised in Newton, Iowa, Dr. Murray received a B.A. in History from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Early in his career, he served as a Peace Corps volunteer and U.S. Agency for International Development contractor in Thailand and later worked as a research scientist at the American Institutes for Research. He was a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research before joining the American Enterprise Institute in 1990.
Murray first gained national attention with Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (1984), which challenged prevailing approaches to American welfare policy and is credited as the intellectual foundation for the Welfare Reform Act of 1996. In The Bell Curve (1994), coauthored with psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein, Murray examined intelligence, socioeconomic outcomes, and the development of America’s class structure. The book became a bestseller while generating extensive controversy and debate over its arguments concerning intelligence, inequality, and race.
His later works have addressed a broad range of questions about human achievement, education, liberty, social class, and American culture. They include What It Means to Be a Libertarian (1997), Human Accomplishment (2003), Real Education (2008), Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (2012), By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission (2015), and Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class (2020). His most recent book, Taking Religion Seriously (2025), shifts from research to autobiography and is a deeply personal account of his decades-long intellectual journey from agnosticism toward belief in God and Christianity.
Today, Murray lives in the rural community of Burkittsville, Maryland, with his wife, Catherine Cox, with whom he coauthored Apollo: Race to the Moon. He is the father of four grown children.
