1. Public political theorising

As Wendy Brown argues, in a rush to overcome the dangerous nihilism of our times—exemplified in the likes of Trump’s “post-truth” politics—it is important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. If the “faculty” sacrifices the massive gains made by higher education institutions over centuries to carve out their own specialised niche of scientific truth, theorisation, and detached critique in order to “take on” directly the disinformation peddled by demagogues, techno oligarchs, and “influencers” all fanned by social media, they may simply feed the beast. The “professoriat” risks this being grist to the mill of these supposed “innovators”: in explicitly taking sides, universities would further reinforce the notion that they are bastions of “radical leftists” and so on. They should rather stick to evidence-based truth, critique, and the defence of democratic values.Footnote ³ What makes this possible in (and in part explains the success of) public higher education institutions is the enormous rewards and stature they have reaped from centuries of division of labour and specialisation. To be opposed to this is tantamount to being opposed to all forms of progress or to the use of money in the exchange of goods and services. As Adam Smith and Karl Marx noted, one of the advances wrought by capitalism is a co-constitutive process of division of labour and specialisation, which leads to greater and greater capability for technological and other associated “advances.” Capitalism’s intellectual, technological, communicative, and educational innovations have brought with them major positive effects on the everyday lives of citizens, and the capability of their states to manage ever more complex private and public provision to meet needs - even if it has done so in highly unequal ways.

Neoliberalism extends and undermines these developments. It has involved a process of ever-increasing privatisation and deregulation of the processes through which these needs are determined and met. This is due to the fact that neoliberal capitalism entrenches two central tenets of liberal capitalism. First, it assumes that freedom amounts to the unhindered individual access to goods and services guided by the satisfaction of individual desires, safeguarded via strictly enforced property rights, as well as the right to unrestricted economic enterprise and consumer choice. Second, it rests on a highly restricted role for strictly public entities like states or cities—a thesis that assumes that efficiency obtains via private organisations competing to meet needs and desires driven by the profit motive.

Now, while this may be the case for certain sorts of goods, it is very far from the case vis-à-vis a large number of goods where market competition fails effectively to meet the needs of everyone in a relatively fair way. This failure may be due to the fact that the nature of the good disallows for meaningful competition, for example, competing private train companies having to use the same train tracks and other public infrastructure. Or it may arise due to the nature of the need in question. For example, the need for clean air is not something that individuals alone can choose amongst a variety of options. Some have argued that most needs, goods, and services are like this need, that is, they are collective needs that require the actions of collective authorities—collectively determined decisions and interventions. Others firmly disagree. I cannot resolve this dispute here. Suffice to say two things for my argument. First, the thesis that underpins neoliberalism rests on a etiolated view of what constitutes the public. Second, the idea that all goods and services are best rolled out via private provision flies in the face of a large swathe of human history, especially as regards what has become known as the humanities.

These two points are brought out neatly via an examination of an erroneous distinction between philosophy as practised in the ancient world—supposedly as private art—and philosophy as practised in the modern world, as visible to anyone and with consequences and effects on the public, especially on government.Footnote ⁴ As Raymond Geuss points out, this misses the important fact that Socrates practised this art in a way quite different to the sophists; the latter charged money for their instruction, while Socrates was keen to speak to anyone free of charge. Moreover, this view privileges the state in its analysis of the public. Yet, there exists a whole swathe of activities, goods, and services that are not about or for the state, and yet are still very much public. Think, for example, of educational institutions: even when they are privately owned and managed, they are providing a public good. And this has a definite and important historical precedent and formation in the case of the humanities—for a long time, the Catholic Church played (and sometimes still does) an extremely important role in education and in the cultivation of the precursor disciplines to the modern humanities.Footnote ⁵ And the Catholic church is neither a private corporation, à la Google (or Alphabet), nor is it part of the state apparatus or government. The distinction between “public” as matters of state and “private” as everything else is too simplistic and is assumed in modern neoliberal narratives.

Universities are distinct kinds of places, and despite the pressure to do so, the humanities still finds it difficult to have its “outputs” counted and monetised in the same way as Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics subjects and “products” have been. Until very recently, the humanities were not about “results” in these terms but, as Geuss puts it, rather about:

In bowing to the demands of “ouput” calculations, and even monetisation, the humanities undermines its import, distinction, and contributions. Research driven by these calculations ends in ever more specialised language and logic, driven in part by very large private corporations (especially large journal publishers), who have successfully monetised these products for their own gain, behind paywalls and the like. This has made political theory even more esoteric and further away from the eyes of everyone, enslaved within a process of privatising knowledge, rewarding “novel” outputs irrespective of whether they have any real effect on the process of transforming ourselves or our world or our understanding of either.Footnote ⁷ Most political theorists, therefore, find themselves in a double bind. They are paid (poorly) by public institutions to carry out their research and teaching—and most retain the laudable imperatives noted above—and yet more and more they become cogs in a large, corporate, marketised logic that incentivises them to produce “outputs” from which neither they nor the broader public will gain, only their public educational institutions and a few private corporations.

This is not public political theory. The sense of public that is most relevant here is not so much about who owns or manages these institutions from whence the ideas come, or whether they are fee-paying or not (even if these remain consequential), but as regards the function and audience of the political theorists employed therein. The point of political theory is to affect (or transform) our understanding of inherently political goods, and therefore the audience in question must be the public at large, for citizens are the ultimate beneficiaries (or otherwise) of this kind of endeavour. It follows, therefore, that the centrally significant notion of “public” at play is “accessibility.” These ideas, arguments, proposals, and manifestos need to be open to anyone. This is much more in line with the Socratic mould. We do political theory a disservice if we think of it as a species of exclusive expertise, delivered by a “master instructor” to whom one has access via some kind of fee-paying mechanism. Thus, undertaking properly public political theory—political theory that is really openly accessible to anyone—requires a different institutional arrangement that incentivises at least a couple of things, saving the craft from the brink of private oblivion and orienting it to a series of truly public functions. First, the focus should be public problems and solutions—theorising substantively. Second, political theorists’ audience needs to expand from one another to everyone (anybody who is capable and willing to listen or read). Public political theory that is open and accessible to everyone needs a different institutional matrix, different dispositions and sensibilities, and argumentation that prioritises persuading the broadest possible public.

In contrast, even to those who understandably celebrate existing forms of public intellectuals in advanced economies, what I have in mind here is not (or, better, not only) those who “apply” their thinking to enhance policy formation—sit on ethics committees, consult for government, and so on. Rather, it is about speaking directly to fellow citizens about the real political issues and problems of the day, via critique of received opinions, crises, questions, and ideological currents, or questioning the very bases and assumptions that undergird how politics in a specific somewhere carries on. Marx, Amílcar Cabral, and Turner epitomise this attitude, Marx in nineteenth-century Europe and the latter two in twentieth-century Africa. What marks these figures out—and there are of course many more (Frantz Fanon, Steve Biko, James Baldwin, Paulo Freire, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o)—is that they were driven to substantively challenge some of the givens of their time, and were able to do so with persuasive élan. They did not follow any particular method, they were not kept behind paywalls, and they rejected much of what had come before them.

One further point is that their contexts—quite different to professional departments of humanities in developed polities today—made it more pressing for them to adopt these roles. They were intellectuals and freedom fighters. Many may quarrel that they can hardly be good models for public political theory more generally. Countering this, I would suggest that they adopted these roles and took on these battles not only due to some “revolutionary” disposition, but because the contexts in which they lived, thought, and loved meant that they had little option but to become activists speaking to much broader publics: Marx in defence of an oppressed working class, Turner in opposition to apartheid, and Cabral in fighting colonial rule. Moreover, in different contexts, it is still possible to make everyday citizens your primary audience, without having to be “revolutionary” in the way these figures may have been. In addition, Turner was quite unlike Marx and Cabral in this respect. Turner was a university-educated theorist and held a university lectureship, who, in a short few years, became such a prominent public political theorist that the apartheid state felt the urgent need to murder him.Footnote ⁸

2. The theoretical attitude

Turner was a South African academic and activist. In 1978, at the age of 37, he was assassinated in his home by an agent of the apartheid state. As a white South African, he rejected the racial supremacy, sexism, and authoritarianism of apartheid rule, engaged in various forms of activism, and became an ally of the Black Consciousness leader, Steve Biko. It was almost certainly Turner’s significant role in the “Durban moment” in the 1970s, when the city of Durban became the centre of the most vibrant resistance to apartheid, that led to his death.

In his search for a just alternative to the oppressive apartheid order, Turner blended Marxism with French existentialism in a singular fashion. His ideas can be summed up with a qualification of Marx’s famous dictum: the point of philosophy is not just to interpret the world, but to change it, not least by changing oneself. Footnote ⁹ This is central to Turner’s intellectual distinctiveness. A key example of his personal transformation was his choice to marry and live openly with a black Muslim person at a time when sex and marriage across racial lines were illegal in South Africa.

Turner’s affirmation of radical freedom as personal political practice, his focus on transforming consciousness as a condition of freedom, the connection between personal and collective action, and a commitment to transforming the world into a just order based on human love are ideas that he conveyed in his teaching at the University of Natal from 1970.

One of his most important and novel contributions was on the nature and importance of what he called the “theoretical attitude.” To have the theoretical attitude is to be able to grasp the “present as history.” To fully understand what he means by this, it is necessary to unearth why he thought utopian thinking is vital. He makes two main points here.

First, even the basic outline of an ideally just society enables us to see beyond the supposedly natural givens of our society and explore possibilities that its current assumptions regarding “common-sense” deem impossible or unfeasible. Positing or sketching an ideally just society invites us to think beyond the supposedly “natural” givens of our particular society and “explore” even “attack” all of the “implicit assumptions about how to behave towards other people that underlie our daily actions in all spheres.” This enables us to free ourselves from the common sense that our society—its institutions and associated ways of behaving—is fixed, rigid, or somehow natural. Using examples such as private property, gendered social relations, and the (often biologically explained) superiority of whites and inferiority of blacks, he argues that these social institutions are simply made up of how people behave towards one another in the there and then of apartheid South Africa. And, unlike a mountain or an ocean, these social institutions can be changed, but only if we adopt a different attitude to them: that yes, they exist, but they are a human creation, and so we can change them.Footnote ¹⁰

Second, as he puts it, “unless we can see our society in the light of other possible societies we cannot even understand how and why it works as it does, let alone judge it.”Footnote ¹¹ The example of racism is again the case in point. For whites then (and for some still today), it was “common sense,” that is, accepted as given, that blacks were inferior, and this was also explained via biology (it was supposed). Turner argues that to explain a social fact by direct reference to biology—nature—is to misunderstand it and thus obscure the avenues through which to explain and understand the social causes of the actual “inferiority,” that is, the actually existing forms of domination and exploitation. This is why Turner is insistent on the idea that “common-sense thinking obscures reality.”Footnote ¹² It tends to take the world (the society) as it is “now” and then reify it as given, natural. He ends off as follows:

He is making two critical arguments here, closely associated but distinct. He is arguing that utopian thinking is necessary both for understanding how a society works and evaluating it, that is, assessing it in the light of other possibilities and the associated moral and political judgements in this process of critique, assessment, and choice. Many have criticised utopian thinking using an argument that moves in exactly the opposite direction. That utopianism tends to disconnect us from the reality of our collective existence in the here and now and thus fails to provide much insight into how best to get from this distorted reality to a prized future reality.Footnote ¹⁴ How (and why) is Turner able to reverse this received opinion?

The clue comes immediately after the passage above when Turner argues that, in order “to understand a society, to understand what it is, where it is going and where it could go, we cannot just describe it. We also need to theorise about it. We need continually to refer back and forth between what we see in society and what is essential to any society.”Footnote ¹⁵ He puts this succinctly in an earlier, shorter piece:

Central to Turner’s idea of the “theoretical attitude” is the ability to grasp the “present as history.” If we do, we will avoid a series of pitfalls: seeing history as a linear process of unfolding into perfection in our current “civilisation”; and that our social institutions and forms of behaviour have been and will remain the same. In fact, these have changed and will continue to change. They are mutable. Or, in other words, as he puts it, “[t]he fact that something exists is no guarantee that it will continue to exist or that it should exist.”Footnote ¹⁷

Within this mould of thinking, there is also the need to see the future as present, via a clear synoptic view of the present. Utopian thinking plays a role here as well, as does a form of realism that Turner fails to entertain.

The centrally important question, “How should we live together?” quickly becomes, “Who does what to whom for whose benefit?” and how might this need to be changed?Footnote ¹⁸ Even if we agree with Marx’s famous dictum, we still need to know a little bit more about what this really means, how we go about it, and why theory is thus so important. In doing so, we can say with Turner and Floyd that, beyond the obvious, the present is history in at least three important ways: it is necessary and helpful in our analysis and critique of our extant political world and in how we order our values, principles, and priorities.Footnote ¹⁹

To see this, it may be helpful to first expand upon an assumption that most would agree with. Politics involves judgements by rulers and ruled within a particular concrete context regarding our agency, needs, interests, and values, as well as how best to improve the social, political, and economic conditions in this context.Footnote ²⁰ This is undertaken with greatest prudence when it draws from theoretical analysis that builds on historically informed critique of the conceptual, normative, and ideological frameworks that inform these everyday political judgements. For the existing theoretical frameworks of our judgements heavily affect how we collectively conceive of our most pressing power relations, priorities, and penalties.

Political theory cannot get anywhere without marshalling or inventing concepts, norms, and ideas to comprehend and thus contest our politics. Most often, these are driven by pressing practical problems: How to hold to account our political leaders? Which collective goods require public provision? How might we better organise our democracy? How best to engage with global political and economic power relations? and so on. While conceptual innovation is a central part of this, to argue from this that the main (or only) role of political theory is conceptual or normative clarification is to cripple political theory. For, as Marx, Cabral, Biko, and Turner, to name only a few, could see clearly, this process of using language for understanding and change is always political, pressing, and engaged. To contest in the public arena of ideas is to dispute our views of where we are, why we got to where we are, and where to from here. This involves a subversive attitude to received opinion and canonical positions and figures. Critique is vital, as is the clear-eyed defence of values that, however warped, can be gleaned from existing ideas, disputes, opinions, and institutions.

Turner’s emphasis on what might be called a human’s “radical freedom to choose” is central to his view, and it encompasses not only everyday choices in life but also—most importantly—the possibility of living and loving in radically different ways from those accepted by the institutions and practices of our time, as his own life exemplified. As discussed in the next section, he was as involved in politics off-campus as he was in teaching and research on-campus. This model of social change places teaching at the centre of the process of developing the theoretical attitude, something required for individual freedom through conscious choice. Vital to this is a process of dialogue rather than lecturing, a process of Socratic dialogue that aims to draw out what is already within. Turner was firmly invested in dialogic rather than didactic teaching and learning. Furthermore, this dialogue is one that disrupts through rational reflection on the “common sense” values and ideas of systems of domination of the day. Central to this reformed Socratic method is a living insistence on being (or exemplifying) a condition made famous by Socrates: being the gadly of Athens.Footnote ²¹ Critical praxis requires a firmly irreverent attitude towards received opinion, not just regarding those narratives and power relations that hold sway in one’s society—or “common sense”—but also vis-à-vis more “specialist” givens, as proposed by past, especially canonised, political theorists. This is also exemplified well by Marx, who attacked both the anti-political arguments of the utopian socialists and the abstract constitutionalism of the likes of Hegel—unlike both he was for free, popular rule and against technocratic schemes to be administered by technical experts.Footnote ²²

When we critique our existing, contextual political order, hierarchies, structures, values, and principles, we quickly come to see that our everyday needs, interests, and values, as well as broader institutional and normative structures, are not given by nature but are the result of individual and collective choices in the past. Their presence today is formative of the way we think and judge. Yet this is not because of “natural” nor “organisational” imperatives, but due to power relations, priorities, and privileges formed in the past. And this past can be traced, unearthing avenues not taken and possibilities now deemed impossible. Our histories are replete with examples of choices imposed on others, paths not taken, and chances missed. Political theory that focuses on the “history as present” and the present as future can bring these out best and thus, sometimes, enable all of us to see that what we now see as impossible may be both possible and desirable. It may also bring out that, although we have the power to choose, especially to choose to live freely, à la Turner, the substance of the choices, as well as how we conceive and respond to them, are heavily affected by our and our societies’ pasts—how we are socialised, as Turner also emphasised.

3. Popular organisation and the transformation of popular consciousness

At first glance, this focus is reminiscent of the Gramscian idea of the “organic intellectual,” a person from the non-ruling stratum who is able to understand social relations in a critical way and relate this back to not only the non-ruling group but also other social groups.Footnote ²³ Yet there are subtle and important differences. First, the public political theorist does not necessarily have to emanate from the working classes, or at least some non-ruling group. Turner exemplifies this. Second, importantly, although Turner maintains that to be effective the public intellectual must be involved in collective organisation, he does not require them to lead collective resistance, or be involved in any form of violent collective resistance. So how does this capacity to theorise or think critically obtain when we live relations of domination through which we are socialised into the values and ideas of the powerful (or ruling group)?

Turner’s answer is that, first, socialisation is always partial, as everyone’s upbringing is unique, “and in this uniqueness lies the possibility that the socialisation process may fail.”Footnote ²⁴ Second, the internal contradictions of society create cognitive dissonance that may provoke reflection in individuals. His example is workers whose experiences on the shop floor create resistance to the wishes of the powerful, thus prompting the workers to challenge the ideas and values of the powerful too, but we could think of many others besides. Third, he points out the growth of oppositional practices and cultures, such as union organising, that often emerge in response to the contradictions. As he puts it:

In other words, the theoretical attitude tends mostly to develop within organisations, and thus, by implication, it is usually taught or learned from the example of others. In essence, socialisation into common-sense thinking by the institutions of the powerful must be challenged by socialisation within organisations formed to resist it. Socialisation is thus both the source and the solution to false knowledge about the world. However, socialisation is but a process of education—of teaching and learning—and thus requires teachers. In other words, what has been called the process of ideology critique is best coupled with both personal reflection and collective action to bring about social change that is identified through a process of deep personal and collective reflection.

This is a journey that is hard for the individual to take alone, and impossible to take apolitically. Hence, in his practice as an intellectual activist, Turner modelled the role of the teacher as a kind of facilitator alongside the student on the collective journey towards political enlightenment and personal liberation, both inside and outside the university. Between 1970 and 1973, he gave at least 48 speeches and lectures outside the confines of the university lecture hall and probably many more informally on topics, including radical thought, socialism, communism, Sartre, and Marcuse.Footnote ²⁶ He also initiated a programme of “action research,” where students had to research the working life of African workers in Durban.Footnote ²⁷ Even more significant, however, was his involvement with a number of like-minded academics in setting up the Institute for Industrial Education and establishing the journal, the South African Labour Bulletin. Turner’s politics was more about a battle of ideas linked to organisation, than through organisation linked to violent confrontation. This reflected his belief in the possibility of radical freedom through the development of a theoretical attitude and the practice of theory, but then also changing behaviour personally and organisationally to prefigure the democratic socialist future in the present.Footnote ²⁸ For Turner, the meaning of praxis that emerges from the critical reflection on practice requires personal and collective choice to behave differently in the present and affirm the value of prefigurative practice both individually and organisationally.Footnote ²⁹ In sum, Turner’s politics of popular organisation was a complement to the transformation of popular consciousness he held so dear and practised so well.

4. Utopian thinking and the imagination

There is a further associated component in answering the question of exactly how critical, collective thinking occurs, given the dynamics of domination and socialisation.

The answer lies in part in the realist nature of utopian thinking. “Utopia,” coined by Sir Thomas More in 1516, means both “no place” and “good place,” that is, a place that is very good or a place that is nowhere—one that does not exist in reality. However, since it is being discussed at all, it must exist at least in the imagination, which is the glue that binds this all together. This hints at the role of realism. As Gustav Landauer argued in his book Die Revolution, “Topia” is the total state of a society at any given time, while “Utopia” is constituted by the whole array of individual impulses that can come together and move the world in the direction of a perfectly functioning social formation that “contains no harmful or unjust elements.”Footnote ³⁰ That is, at any given time, a given population will have (various) conceptions of what is harmful or unjust, and these changing conceptions provide the kernel of their utopian aspirations. Landauer maintains, therefore, that at any given point in time, our utopian impulses derive from two sources: dissatisfaction with the given topia and remembrance of all previous utopias, that is, memory of practically attempted or merely theorised alternative possible worlds or ways of living together. This spurs us to revitalise past utopian impulses and ways of thinking.

In doing so, Landauer appeals to the twofold sense of the English word “realise,” that is, both “come to an understanding of” and “bring into existence.” History is supposed to realise previously embodied utopian impulses in both senses of the word. History, he thought, much like Turner again, was at least as much about creating new forms of cooperative human action and thus about the future as it was about the past.Footnote ³¹ In other words, contrary to Turner’s rather short reduction of realism to mere empirical description of the social and political world “out there,” it is more helpful to see the theoretical attitude espoused by Turner in terms akin to Landauer’s: to be realist as regards understanding and prescription requires both utopian thinking (in general) and a view of the “present as history” and the future as present.Footnote ³² To be utopian, one needs to be realist in the sense of having enough knowledge about one’s society and its history to understand and explain why it is as it is. In simpler terms, utopian thinking is necessary for us to realise—understand and bring into existence—better ways of living together in the future.

In short, utopian thinking is necessary for realism in political theory, and realism is necessary for utopian impulses. Realism in political theory involves both a description of reality and a historically informed judgement of how best to proceed towards a more prized reality, something unattainable without the historical and imaginative elements that constitute utopian impulses. In other words, realist utopian forays are springboards for imaginative leaps out of the confines of the present, the basis of making the impossible possible for the future. This is no easy feat, but the art of good judgement in politics is, in part, the process of determining which of the seemingly impossible alternatives brought out by utopian thinking may, in fact, now be possible and desirable, that is, which of them to choose and how to make them achievable.

In sum, imagination in general, and imaginative leaps on the basis of realist understanding of existing public problems in particular, constitute a vital component of how the theoretical attitude can be forged and the shackles of “common sense” broken. This is at once an individual capacity and one that depends on learning from the examples of others and learning how not to be constrained by received, naturalised givens and associated processes of socialisation. History can become both a basis of experiential learning and something that can be changed. So, although the public political theorist can come from anywhere and does not necessarily have to forge counter-hegemony (à la Gramsci’s “organic intellectual”), she or he will find imaginative inspiration from the inherently public, political nature of their endeavour to change the world for the better as part of collective, cooperative alternative structures and forms of living. The imagination necessary for the theoretical attitude and utopian mindset Turner defends is unlikely to emerge from the likes of Gramsci’s category of “traditional intellectual,” who is happy to defend (or work within) ideas and forms of life that legitimise the status quo, partly of course because this quietism is unlikely to spark the desire to imagine alternatives. The particular attitudes that drive some political theorists (or activists) to become public intellectuals—to want to change the world, oneself, and one’s fellow citizens—come from (and create) different sensibilities and dispositions that fuel their imaginative capacities to think beyond the present. The gadfly is a healthy irritant not only to society more generally but also to the individual public political theorist.

5. The public political theorist’s audience: Democratic political judgement

There are three centrally important consequences of viewing public political theorists in this way. These are necessary for good political judgement in democracies.

First, the point of political theory is to change the world (partly by changing oneself). If this is put together with how dependent we are on one another—not only as a result of ever-increasing division of labour and specialisation but also by dint of our vulnerabilities and incapacities as single agents—it does not take much to see why these processes of change are never just about internal individual debates or even about like-minded (or trained) experts deliberating within institutions of higher education alone. If interpreting the world to change it and oneself is the main goal of the public political theorist, her or his primary and most consequential audience is her or his fellow citizens (local, national, and global). These processes of change involve the realism discussed above. In other words, they cannot get anywhere without knowledge of other people’s conditions of existence, attitudes, and opinions. This helps individuals come to a synoptic understanding of their society. This synoptic understanding, however, remains one-sided and insufficient without including subjective opinions of those living the lives in question. The outcome of this is an objective analysis of the context in question, gleaned from both objective and subjective inputs. It follows, therefore, that the main function of the public political theorist is to engage with ordinary citizens via a variety of means, using this objective realist account of “where we are” to persuade fellow citizens as regards three matters: why things are as they are, where to go from here, and how best to get there. The sine qua non of any positive outcome with regard to these three goals is that the audience of the public political theorist be everyone and anyone (willing and able to read or listen). Maintaining a highly specialised audience will leave little hope of persuading anyone besides an intellectual or policy elite.

Second, if this is correct, it follows that to reach this fully public audience, the public political theorist must, at least part of the time, write and speak differently and in different forums. This is already happening via substacks, podcasts, and the like, but they are significantly diluted by the prevalence of social media more generally, most of which distracts and bombards citizens, and fails to criticise the status quo. Given this and the links between context, realism, and utopian forays fuelled by the imagination and popular organisation, I submit that the most effective public political theorists will be those that speak about local, practical problems. Obviously, some problems are inherently global—climate change, public health policy, and so on—but they are often brought to light best by explaining how they affect local lives and environments, why this is important, and how to potentially build better alternatives. Unfortunately, quite a lot of the “normal” writing of even public political theorists is hidden behind paywalls. The paywalls that bedevil academic publishing, and that supposedly keep publishing houses afloat, not only incentivise political theorists to become more and more “expert” and speak only amongst themselves, but also they effectively bar ordinary citizens from access to these debates. Bringing down the paywalls would not only give everyone access, but it may also restrict the gatekeeping that attends it. Finally, public political theorists need to rid themselves of deference to current policy imperatives and theoretical canonisation. Too much instrumental focus on refining existing policy constrains the capacity to envisage completely new ways of proceeding in politics and economics, as do slavish attitudes to academic canons. To move away from these constraints, public political theorists must intentionally turn towards the public and its problems and escape academic echo chambers.

I am not suggesting that there is no room for specialised academic journals, but at the very least, the general public should be able to access these and the debates that go on within them. A journal like this one is a good example of how to start the process of breaking down forms of exclusion and exclusivity. Yet representative democracy today, alongside reactions against it, is bedevilled by another, avoidable associated exclusivity: technocratic elitism. Public political theorists should be part of confronting this problem, not by joining the elite, but by helping citizens enter the battle of ideas. So, to be clear, my celebration of resisting the power of our intellectual forebears is an attitude rather than a strict principle. Of course, many ideas passed down from previous generations of political theorists (and other kinds of study within the humanities) are valuable, but not because they are “our” heritage. They must be scrutinised in terms of their actual or potential contribution to understanding the present and transforming the future.

Third, the skills of the public political theorist are part and parcel of a process of public education. All citizens need the imaginative and historical capabilities discussed above and while not all can acquire the kind of specialised knowledge of the formally trained political theorist, judging and acting in democratic politics requires these skills. We impoverish and endanger our politics, our planet, and ourselves if we fail to see this. The capacity to judge well in politics is not simply the preserve of representatives, policymakers, and expert academic consultants. It is part and parcel of what it is to be a citizen. If we ignore this, we generate passivity vis-à-vis politics, thus helping to vacate the space within which it is decided who does what to whom for whose benefit. This is perilous, for it allows the more wealthy, voracious, and venal quickly to fill the space and dictate our politics. Politics then becomes not about our collective, if often plural and competing, needs, interests, powers, values, and ideas, but about the interests of this select, powerful few. This is no mere theoretical threat, as Zuma’s South Africa, Chavez’s Venezuela, Bolsonaro’s Brazil, and Tump’s USA have made graphically clear. It is a dangerous by-product of our passivity as citizens. By contrast, if our focus is on the quality of our lives and the powers to secure and improve them, in particular public political theorising to enhance everyday political judgement, not only is it possible to enhance our democracies. We also thereby reinforce the idea that democracy remains the only real contender.

Judgement lies at the heart of politics, and for good judgement, all citizens must realise how our individual security, well-being, and freedom are linked to our collective security, well-being, and freedom.Footnote ³³ This requires a willingness to deliberate over and critique everyday facts and deeply held values and beliefs; the timing and courage to find ways of judging collectively under conditions of likely disagreement; and the capacity to persuade others of the collective worth of a proposal.Footnote ³⁴ In sum, the skill individually and collectively to decide when and how to act and what to prioritise is essential. This is not easy, nor is it parochial, as something exemplified by the existential threats posed by the global COVID-19 and climate crises. A lot of political theorists have supposed the panacea lies in innovative institutional blueprints (constitutional or otherwise), often served up by experts seemingly as recipes for current or future policymakers, thereby essentially bypassing the public entirely, on the assumption that there may exist an institutional fix for democracy’s deficiencies. But we need more, always, and everywhere. Democracy must be constantly worked on, by leaders and ordinary citizens, to ensure that it prioritises and enables this collective process of learning for good political judgement.Footnote ³⁵ In other words, the health and vitality of everyone’s democracy is, ultimately, each individual’s responsibility. We learn this quickest within popular organisations.Footnote ³⁶

The critical role of public political theorists is that they can and do guide this political judgement. If they shirk this responsibility, the very existence of the globe is imperilled. The good news is that due to the more and more visceral nature of politics across the globe, the tendency for political theorists to retreat into the life of the “ivory tower,” turning away from the messy business of real politics in the dry pursuit of ever sharper and clearer conceptual tools is on the wane. Corruption and crisis are forcing them to face the actual politics of their time rather than build philosophical castles in the (exclusive) sky (of their privatising universities and journals). The bad news is that the current political narrative of “elitist” higher education institutions is creating a self-defeating reaction amongst these institutions to withdraw and barricade their ramparts against political interference; this isolates them even further from the public. Public political theory from anywhere and everywhere should aspire to overcome this by empowering everyone to judge well in politics: to think critically and politically in search of utopian futures with everyone as audience, made possible through collective organisation.

6. Conclusion: Public political theory

In this article, I have presented some ideas on the “public” in public political theory, and on how best to create what Turner calls the “theoretical attitude.” I then argued that the function of the public political theorist is to change the world, which necessarily involves a change of self based on attempts to change fellow citizens. Our skills and responsibilities as political theorists and as active, creative citizens are not as distant as many assume. We all have the capacity to see the “present as history” and the future as present, identify our interdependent needs and interests and assume the responsibility to ensure our democracies enable utopian forays informed by realist accounts of where we are and how we got here. This is properly political political theory, not because it does or does not focus on institutions, but because it focuses on the essential contestation and constant reconstitution that lies at the heart of democratic politics.Footnote ³⁷ As Marx argued, our knowledge of ourselves and others and of what has formed us is radically open-textured, historically, economically, and politically determined.Footnote ³⁸ Thus, public political theorists, alongside their fellow citizens within popular organisations, need to be fully aware of their role in the constant re-creation of society. If they are, they will inevitably act in a genuinely political manner to overcome the Chinese wall between themselves and their main audience (the public at large): help fellow citizens comprehend, and persuade them, how to live and love together in a more satisfactory way. Or simply provoke them, as would a gadfly.