Mobility without Mayhem: Safety, Cars, and Citizenship. By Jeremy Packer. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. x, 349 pp. Cloth, $84.95, ISBN 978-0-8223-3952-6. Paper, $23.95, ISBN 978-0-8223-3963-2.)

Abstract

In Mobility without Mayhem, Jeremy Packer joins a growing number of scholars in revising the idea that the car provided all Americans with unfettered mobility. In this cultural history, Packer examines the discourses of risk and safety that governed an automobile society from the onset of the Cold War to the beginning of the war on terror. By 1950, the automobile was deeply intertwined with the creation of the postwar American landscape and culture. Instead of assuming that every citizen had equal access to the open road, Packer interrogates the boundaries of automobility through the rhetoric of safe citizenship. Informed by Michel Foucault's work on discipline and power, the book provides a “genealogy of the power/knowledge relationships that determined how to organize and regulate different populations’ access to and use of automobility” (p. 3). Who articulated the tenets of auto conduct and how did these authorities seek to control “risky” populations? How did safe driving inform ideas about good citizenship in Cold War America?