Hegel died in 1831, and within a few years his students split into two camps that between them managed to destroy almost everything valuable in his system. The Right Hegelians kept his commitment to Christianity and to the state, and largely vanished from intellectual history; the Left Hegelians kept the dialectical method, the emphasis on history, and the development of subjectivity, and threw out Christianity and the state as embarrassing conservative baggage. This second group produced - Karl Marx, and through Marx produced Georg Lukács, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, and Theodor Adorno — in other words, most of the major radical thinkers of the twentieth century.

McGowan's argument is that the Left Hegelian victory was actually a disaster, because Christianity and the state were never optional decoration on Hegel's system. Remove them and the theory of freedom the whole system was built to support collapses with them. The image he reaches for is a Star Trek episode in which a transporter malfunction splits Captain Kirk into two beings: one holding all his kindness and generosity, the other holding all his aggression and cruelty. The crew treats the gentle Kirk as the real one, the true Kirk with the ugly half stripped away. But the episode's actual point is that Kirk cannot function as captain without the qualities everyone found unappealing. The Left Hegelians did exactly this to Hegel: they produced a more presentable philosopher by amputating what looked retrograde, and in the process amputated what made him radical.

Ludwig Feuerbach, the first major Left Hegelian, is the clearest case. Feuerbach argued that God is simply a projection of human qualities onto an imaginary beyond, humanity looking in a mirror and mistaking the reflection for something transcendent. He thought this made Hegel more rational, more modern, more defensible to a scientific age. What Feuerbach actually did, on McGowan's reading, was discard Hegel's entire theory of freedom. Because for Hegel, Christianity was never about a distant God handing down commandments from beyond the world; its philosophical weight rests on one specific event, the crucifixion, in which the all-powerful, self-identical God of the beyond is destroyed and revealed as divided, finite, and contradictory. Hegel states the point without softening it: "God himself is dead," and this is not tragedy but emancipation. Once the infinite has shown itself capable of appearing as the most humiliated finite thing imaginable, no substantial, untouchable authority can survive the comparison. A subject who genuinely understands the crucifixion is a free subject, because that subject has been released from the illusion that some Other out there guarantees meaning from a position safely above contradiction. Feuerbach, reducing God to a human projection, thought he was clearing superstition out of the way. He was actually clearing away the one event Hegel needed to make freedom philosophically real.

Marx does something structurally similar with the state. For Marx the state is the ideological arm of the capitalist class, a machine of oppression destined to wither away after the revolution, and given what states have actually done (wars, colonization, Hiroshima), this reading has obvious appeal. But Hegel's state was never primarily a protective or oppressive apparatus. It was constitutive: the mechanism through which a subject discovers that it is a public being before it is a private one. Without some encounter with a collective structure larger than the private self, a subject has no way to recognize its own freedom, because it stays trapped inside the illusions of its own private world — the illusion, in fact, that capitalism specifically depends on to keep functioning. You need the state, or something structurally like it, to pull you far enough outside yourself to see that you were always already shaped by public, historical, collective forces. Subtract the state and what remains is the fantasy of the purely private individual, standing alone, answerable to nothing beyond personal preference, precisely the fantasy a market economy needs its subjects to believe in order to keep operating.

The two subtractions compound each other. Having discarded Christianity, Marx needed something to occupy the position Christianity had held: the promise that history is moving somewhere, that present suffering is redeemed by a future state of things. He found it in the coming proletarian revolution. On McGowan's reading, this reintroduces exactly the substantial Other Hegel's whole system was built to dissolve: a future realm of freedom functioning as the new beyond, the new guarantee, the new absolute that justifies whatever has to happen to reach it, including atrocity. Stalinism, on this account, is not a betrayal of Marx's project so much as its logical consequence, the direct result of replacing God with History as the new object of unconditional faith. Both the Right and Left Hegelians ended up with a structure Hegel would not have recognized as his own.