ABSTRACT
While readers of Hegel know that a latter stage of historical consciousness contains within it elements of a former, perhaps they, like me, have wondered about the mechanics of such a transition. I have often imagined that in the wake of an epic Hegelian transformation, there remains an empty conference room littered with the cigarette butts and coffee mugs of those thinkers who didn’t make it to the next stage. In 1917, Leon Trotsky took up the issue of litter and historical change. When he made the famous declaration to Mensheviks: “You are pitiful isolated individuals; you are bankrupts; your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on-into the dustbin of history,” the dustbin to which he referred was metaphoric.1 It was a figurative resting place for discredited political systems and personalities. This dustbin contained the debris left behind when one historical era progressed to the next, as inevitably dictated by the laws of history. A recent encounter on the street prompted me to further probe this relationship between history and the garbage bin. What if it wasn’t a metaphoric link at all? What would it mean for historians if we actually trashed the losers of history?
