Our common usage of the term ‘utopian’ casts the utopian into the realm of the useless; it is unachievable and so not of use to us. In dire political situations, we find ourselves reaching always for the useful, something that can make a difference, that can build or protect. But we should not confuse achievability with usefulness. There is much in our lives that we pursue and never achieve. We are nonetheless often better off for the pursuit. Our destination is shaped by where we were heading, even if it is not in fact the destination for which we originally aimed. While it is accurate that that which is utopian by definition cannot be achieved, we are missing something valuable when we fail to imagine, in great detail, what a better world might look like.

We are also sometimes tempted to believe that the utopian is abstracted entirely away from our world; that the perfect cannot have roots in our deeply unjust reality. But the ideal does not have to be abstract. To be sure, ideal theorising will abstract away from reality in its presentation of what ideally should be the case, but there is nothing inherent to ideal theorising or utopian thought that requires starting from an ideal or imagined world. In fact, Rick Turner's work encourages us to do the opposite: to begin our utopian theorising from a deep understanding of our current realities. For Turner, utopian thinking is useful precisely because it provides tools to better understand, evaluate and change our society as we find it now.

Turner's ideas about, and practice of, political philosophy within the context of his commitment to resisting the injustice of apartheid South Africa can provide valuable guidance to political philosophers and theorists today – for all of us, but perhaps especially for those of us embedded in privilege within the current version of a white supremacist, patriarchal society. Drawing on the insights of Turner's life and work, I will argue for the value of practising what I term ‘engaged political philosophy’. Engaged political philosophy as a methodological approach to the discipline of political philosophy is inspired by the work, life and ideas of Turner, but is not a claim to set out his view in its entirety or to imagine his comments on current political philosophy.