Ciortea Octavian

“This double significance lies behind the medieval regulations requiring anyone who went out at night to identify himself by carrying a light. Any process of identification that was not reciprocal would have destroyed the 'balance of power' of light carriers, rather like unilateral disarmament in an armed society. The takeover by the state of individual identification by light, institutionalised in the form of public lighting in the seventeenth century, can in fact be compared to the roughly contemporaneous development of a state weapons monopoly in the army and the police. The unstable balance, the 'psychologie des hostilites intimes', between private individuals was replaced by a state monopoly on light and weapons. People submitted to it because it promised to guarantee stability and security. But although public lighting was welcomed as holding out the promise of security, it was also a police institution and, as such, attracted all the hostility traditionally directed at the police.”
― Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century