Achievement of this aim necessitated greater precision in identifying them. Yet at the same time, the rise of liberal and natural law ideas proclaiming individual freedom and the inviolability of the person cast into disfavor older habits of “writing on the body” such as branding, scarification, and tattooing, as well as dress codes as means for identifying persons (except when these methods of marking are voluntarily assumed, of course). As a result, states with a rising interest in embracing their populations had to develop less invasive means to identify people. The approach they adopted
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