This article contextualizes and decontextualizes the intellectual construction of Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve and presents a critical appraisal of the book's controversial analyses of social-class and racial/ethnic differences in intelligence. It refutes as cultural superstition and social science pornography The Bell Curve's theories on the role of intelligence in the social stratification of postindustrial America. It further refutes Herrnstein and Murray's ideas about the effects of IQ on social outcomes such as poverty, schooling, occupation, and underemployment, and counters the pessimistic public policy proposals their research engenders. INTRODUCTION During the post-World War II years through the mid-1960s, macrosociological changes such as rapid industrialization, federal governmental expansion, and the construction of new communities in cities and suburbs of metropolitan areas were reflected in increases of Americans' educational attainment, occupational mobility, and income. These changes symbolized the nation's emergence as an affluent society, poised to enter new frontiers. Concomitantly, the migration and growth of the African American population in U.S. cities and their mobilization as a result of the civil rights movement focussed national attention on the historic and persisting racial caste inequities experienced in schools, employment, voting rights, and public accommodations. The importance of collective action and federal public policies to ameliorate these inequalities was readily apparent. Though structural and organized sources of resistance coexisted with these developments, the convergence of progressive institutional changes alongside movements of social and racial equity would have important consequences for a new and ascendant conventional wisdom of humanity and society. This conventional wisdom, which was reinforced by the optimism, liberalism, and pragmatism of strengthened norms of public intervention affirmed a natural equality and democratic social contract based on progressive inclusion. However, this vision was in competition with an earlier vision of natural inequality based on more pessimistic, conservative, and elitist notions. The salience of this older world view accompanied the nation from the eras of the American Revolution, the framing of the U.S. Constitution, the signing of the Northwest Ordinance, the infamy of the Trail of Tears, and the Mexican War to the eve of the Civil War. Although post-Civil War-Reconstruction-era thinking would energize challenges to this concept of natural inequality, leading American intellectual movements of subsequent eras would later accommodate many of its tenets. Alongside the beliefs of historic Americanization movements such as that of the Know-nothings and advocates of Jim Crow discrimination, Native American removal, Chinese American exclusion, and restrictive immigration were Social Darwinist and racialist beliefs whose tenets were rationalized by appeals to politics, religion, pseudoscience, and common sense. By the end of the 1960s through the 1980s, these earlier post-World War II changes were in transition. The U.S. economy was transformed from an industrially based system to an increasingly postindustrial, service-based system. The federal government was reorganized into an increasingly deregulated federalist system. The influence of organized labor in general and industrial labor unions specifically decreased. The civil rights entitlements gained by Black Americans were extended to persons of various other ethnic and cultural groups. Yet, out of this emerged a new pluralism with respect to conventional wisdoms of humanity and society. While the ascendant liberal wisdom continued to exist, it increasingly had to compete with neoliberal, neoconservative, and conservative conventional wisdoms for a moral common ground. Today, the earlier social equality prospects of the New Deal and the War on Poverty are critiqued as un-American, unrealistic, passe, and disorganizational. …