The national state flipped from acceleration engine to braking obstacle.

Evidence

My diagnosis, to put a fine point on it, is that the national state has metamorphosed from a key accelerating agent into a key decelerating institution or an obstacle to acceleration. As I have argued, the centralization, standardization, and regulation of social developments and processes of exchange by national states in early and “classical” modernity unleashed an immensely dynamizing effect, the most important institutions of which were, on the one hand, the security organs of the military and, on the other, the highly efficient administrative machinery of the state bureaucracy. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 547

Categorization

• XREF: This is the chapter’s central thesis claim; pays off the earlier observation that individual opting out carries prohibitive desynchronization costs — institutions now face their own version of that stuckness. — connects to: Neutral liberal states channel citizens toward one homogeneous capitalist form of life. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 44; Weber’s bureaucratic rationalizers are now read as the paradigm of slowness. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 548