<p>Despite growing attention on the nature and role of public political philosophy, the debate is strikingly narrow in its focus on the role of political philosophy (and political philosophers) within liberal democracies despite the vast political world under non- and semi-democratic conditions, and the democratic crisis within liberal democracies themselves. The aim of this article is therefore twofold: first to widen our contextual view, highlighting that a debate on the nature and role of public political philosophy is incomplete if it does not go beyond liberal western democratic contexts and second, through considering different political contexts, to widen our imagination of what constitutes ‘practical’ political philosophy. The lens through which these two arguments are made is the life and work of anti-Apartheid activist scholar Rick Turner: one example, among many, of the role of public political philosophy beyond liberal democratic contexts. Turner’s articulation of the ‘necessity of Utopian Thinking’ is not presented as the only or best way but, in the spirit of his work, used as a tool to break a sense of conformity within existing debates on public political philosophy, illustrating a much wider range of possibility of how political philosophy can contribute to the project of social change.</p>