One exposed the co-existence of private affluence and public squalor (Ken Galbraith's The Affluent Society). Another presciently warned how the settlement at the end of one world war would provoke another, even more terrible conflict (Maynard Keynes' The Economic Consequences of the Peace). A third adumbrated a realistic framework for conduct of international affairs (Politics Among Nations by Hans Morgenthau). Others revealed the iniquity of Stalinist repression (Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon) or the gross standing injustices embedded in racial discrimination (Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison).

All those books, implicitly or explicitly, invited us to review how we treat and govern each other. None entirely succeeded.

Now two more candidates seek to join those iconoclastic, radical thinkers about governance. Isabel Wilkinson dissects issues of race and caste, while Anne Applebaum scrutinises populism and authoritarianism. Both include the same subtext. Even in scholarly, deeply researched analyses, Donald Trump sucks the oxygen out of the room. The two books outline many lasting recommendations but one short-term fix, in effect urging Americans to elect anyone but Trump next month.

Their shared premise is alarmist: that we have entrenched and encouraged habits of bad governance and that our future is dire if we do not self-correct. To borrow one of their sub-titles, the two authors concern themselves with "the lies that divide us". Their arguments are grounded in serious and emotionally weighted historical research, on gulags and a famine in the former USSR (Applebaum), or on the Jim Crow system of racial discrimination in the American South (Wilkinson).

The two books distil and synthesise what their authors have learned from history, which again serves as the mothership for every social science, including politics and policy. Students of governance do not need to worry that the lessons of history will somehow mechanistically repeat themselves. Nor should they regard history as either a triumphal procession or a dismal record of sins and crimes. All good governance requires is a recognition, with William Faulkner, that "the past is not dead. It is not even past. All of us labour in webs spun long before we were born ..."

Anne Applebaum's Twilight of Democracy (Doubleday) ends with a paean of praise to anti-authoritarian, liberal and democratic impulses. She urges us to renew virtues which "democracies always demanded from citizens: participation, argument, effort, struggle". Applebaum also commends "tolerance for cacophony and chaos" as well as acknowledgment of the possibility of failure. That ending - spirited, principled but sceptical - concludes a quite melancholy appraisal of threats to civil discourse, the rule of law, checks and balances, and sundry hallowed institutions.

Applebaum begins with Poland then brings in Hungary, Britain and the United States. Her analysis might have benefited from more detailed assessments of authoritarians elsewhere (say, Duterte in the Philippines or Bolsonaro in Brazil). More intriguing comment on the fear, guilt and secrecy which authoritarianism provokes is to be found in Anna Funder's masterly study of the former East Germany, Stasiland.

Nonetheless, Applebaum makes points which matter. She regards authoritarianism not merely as an ugly phase in the election cycle or a raucous form of political debate. In Applebaum's judgment, creeping authoritarianism poses a grave threat. Enemies and scapegoats are fabricated, government becomes irredeemably partisan and the courts pliable. Although there is lots of evidence for that argument, Applebaum moves on to shakier ground in asserting that authoritarianism "is a frame of mind, not a set of ideas".

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For her, the "authoritarian predisposition" afflicts people who cannot abide complexity, who are stirred by resentment and envy, susceptible to conspiracy theories and favour homogeneity and order. That approach runs awkwardly close to Hillary Clinton denouncing half of Trump's supporters as "a basket of deplorables" or Barack Obama complaining that his redneck opponents clung to their guns and religion.

Wilkinson would argue that any such stereotyping and condescending towards others is one marker of ruling caste behaviour. Her Caste scrutinises what she regards as an age-old malady. Wilkinson uses caste as a portmanteau word, subsuming hierarchy, racism, inequality, segregation and discrimination. She dissects the notion a caste might deserve the privileges they claim. As with Applebaum, her final words include a whiff of optimism. She hopes we might realise a person's background does not determine capacity and appreciate that we are "in need of one another more than we have been led to believe". Wilkinson highlights the need for vigilance and wariness, deploring rearguard caste actions where "the awkward becomes acceptable and the unacceptable becomes merely inconvenient".

Again, those positive notes are offset by a sobering narrative, here about how ruling castes scrabble to retain power. Nazi Germany and India supplement Wilkinson's sharply critical treatment of the United States. She thinks caste and race reinforce each other, with all of us therefore "born into a silent war game, centuries old, enlisted in teams not of our own choosing". Wilkinson therefore tries to expose social and governance divisions and anxieties more troubling than just our current woes. She is consistently vehement, even insistent. Her fulminations against caste arrogance may well provide an essential intellectual, historical framework for Black Lives Matter.

Both writers warn against nostalgia, as exploited by authoritarians or castes. Personal liberalism and political liberalisation are their watchwords. Who thought such reminders would be so essential?