He made contributions in the fields of political science, religion, education, and philosophy in a long career of writing, teaching, and public speaking.

He was educated at the University of Glasgow, earning First-class honours in Classics and was awarded a Snell Exhibition to attend Balliol College, Oxford in 1913.

[2] While on leave recovering from a broken ankle in 1917, Macmurray was invited to give a sermon in an unidentified North London church.

The sermon was coldly received by the congregation and Macmurray saw their reaction as indicating a lack of true Christianity in the institutional churches.

Because of this experience, Macmurray determined not to be a member of any church, while continuing to maintain his strong Christian convictions.

[3]: 80–81 After the war, Macmurray completed his studies at Balliol, obtaining a distinction in the Shortened Honours Course of Literae Humaniores in 1919, as well as winning in the John Locke Scholarship in Mental Philosophy in the same year.

He argued for the importance of emotion as motivating action, and looked to infancy and early childhood for evidence of the universal desire for relationship.

[1] In dismissing the Cogito and its legacy of the primacy of thought over action, Macmurray saw himself as breaking with the western philosophical tradition.

Tony Blair contributed the foreword to one of the anthologies, in which he described Macmurray's philosophy as "immensely modern... in the sense that he confronted what will be the critical political question of the twenty-first century: the relationship between individual and society".