Taken literally – as a comprehensive model for society – Rick Turner's prescription is implausible, or so I will argue. So how should we view The Eye of the Needle now? We could view it as a product of a South African ‘moment’. We can also register the attractiveness of Turner's idealism. But the present project invites us to seek – which means to impute – larger meanings that might still resonate in the 2020s. Can we find them?

Some seek the book's ongoing relevance in its model of insistent radical critique, including of materialistic capitalism, Stalinist bureaucracy and narrow race politics. But Turner was not interested, for its own sake, in a politics of criticism and refusal. His prescription for a future participatory democracy was central to his efforts, certainly in The Eye of the Needle. He intended to dramatise not just the possibility of alternatives, but a possible alternative. Yet this means that the weaknesses of Turner's rendition of socialist participatory democracy damage his project. There is also a question about how fully his work resonates with a global moment where, arguably, the ‘primary contradiction’ is not between liberal and participatory democracy, but between liberalism and forces of illiberalism (some of which forces the mantle of ‘truer’ democracy). The challenge for a radical democratic theory today is not to find participatory alternatives to liberal democracy but to render liberal democracy more participatory – and participatory democracy more liberal. Some of what Turner says speaks fruitfully to that challenge, but not all of it.

WHAT SORT OF UTOPIAN IS TURNER?

Turner's reflections on utopianism are important, leaving aside his democratic model. It is possible to imagine a version of his book that speaks just of utopian possibility without offering a concrete institutional utopia. This is The Eye of the Needle sans chapters four, five and seven. In this abridged version (and especially in chapters one and two) we encounter a searing critique of capitalism's incompatibility with a Christian human model and of its instrumentalisation of human relations. A defence of this Turner does not require defending wild idealism. Turner offers what we might, following Erik Olin Wright, term real utopianism (Wright 2010). He not only invites us to believe that change is possible (and sometimes realistically inescapable); he requires us to distinguish what is changeable, and what is not, in human affairs. Not everything, he acknowledges, is. In this he is right.