from a review of Partha Chatterjee's book Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World

“The Cunning of Reason” is a short (anti-)Hegelian coda and conclusion to the book. Where Hegel had found a promise of salvation upon what he grimly described as “the slaughter-bench of history” (thanks to “the cunning of Reason”), Chatterjee see Reason as “sovereign, tyrannical universality,” which “in its universalizing mission has been parasitic upon a much less lofty, much more mundane, palpably material and singularly invidious force, namely the universalist urge of capital” (168). Reason and capital, according to Chatterjee, have fused into the juggernaut of “development,” and nowhere has nationalism as such been able to halt this giant’s march through the world.