I'd say that the difference is not the law of unintended consequences because this same concept is marshalled in left analysis such as marx's claim that the unintended consequence of the pursuit of wealth by capital is that class society creates its own demise.
Marx saw all revolutionary change emanating from the contradictions within its own system.
Not quite but almost Conservative uses of the same observable phenom tend to be more like Max Weber's response. The unintended consequence of the protestant ethic was to help usher in a capitalist regime and the unintended consequence of that spirit of capitalism was to entrap us in an iron cage where we, without anticipating it, become ""Specialist without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of humanity never before achieved"
Max Weber just got depressed because he didn't know what to do. He couldn't embrace the do nothing attitude of a Kristol, but he ended up arguing that change would eventually come about in the form of charismatic leadership. (This is where Carrol tends to sound like Weber: in his embrace of the concept punctuated equilibrium, which Stephen Jay Gould ended up rejecting in his last book anyway.
Weber never went completely conservative on this issue. The difference between a conservative and leftist analysis is each has a different conception of human being. Kristol's argument is that the unintended consequences result from Liberals' mistaken concept of human nature. Liberals tend to think humans aren't naturally lazy, greedy, selfish, and prone to inertia. That they arenaturally good and are only not good by virtue of unnatural forces -- like a deformed society or 'bad' culture. (The best and often funniest essay I can think of is by some economics dude, name I've forgotten, which was in a book called something like "Capitalism, Democracy and Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery". His last name began with M. Muller or something. Anyway...)
Conservatives are hard-headed realists, damn it! People are greedy, selfish, lazy, and prone to inertia and any system of government that creates policy as if that weren't so is doomed to fail. (Weber may have seemed conservative, but he never really believed people were lazy asses at heart.)
So, it's not some irrevocable law since if it were, it would apply to everything, including the neocon program -- neocons hope to direct the course of human events too.Kristol thinks that the real problem is that Liberals work against human nature, and thus the unanticipated consequences. If you create social policy to work with human nature, no more unintended results.
Kristol does not against Adam Smith's work on unintended consequences, right? He does not rail against that! That is because Adam Smith's program worked *with* human nature -- at least in Kristol's mind. (If it -- uninteded consequences -- was anyone's idea to begin with, it was the Scottish Enlightenment, yes? IIRC, there is an extended chapter on this concept in the book, _The Idea of Civil Society_. In fact, the birth of sociology was all about the rise of inquiry into this puzzle: how is it that, when humans act X way on an individual basis, it turns out that their individual level actions do not necessarily make for a society that you'd expect? Why the unintended consequences?)
Anyway, Smith argued that, in spite of the fear at the time, that everyone pursuing their own self interest would result in a world of chaos and despair. the unintended effect of everyone pursuing their own ends was the good society directed, magically, by the invisible hand. In trying to get my own beer, bread, and beef, and serve my own desires and needs, I end up helping everyone else get their own beer, bread, and beef. The idea was so endemic, unintended consequences of governmental ("social engineering") at the time that it formed the basis of the U.S. first government, the government that governs best, governs least. I mean, for christ sake, it is the united STATES of america, not the united STATE of america. and then you had the federalist papers whereupon, repeatedly, we find arguments about how to "social engineer" a society by creating, not tendencies toward solidarity, but fostering "factionalism". The idea was that unintended consequence of factionalism would be -- voila! -- a more cohesive society. Foster factionalism -- contention, differences, adversarial politics, etc. etc. -- and you magically get the "good society" and the boat rises with the tide and all that happy horse shit -- the unintended consequence of greed, selfishness, etc.
Our entire legal system is founded on that very principle: foster an adversarial politics (not a politics of consensus), foster an adversarial system where "truth" emerges from the struggle of idea against idea, where we learn who is guilty or not guilty (there is no such thing as "innocent") by virtue of a struggle of adversarial opponents -- since truth can't be determined by any consensus building politics.
And all of it, Smith too, was a product of Scottish Enlightenment -- which got its shiggles and gits from kind of freaking out about how it would be possible to have a society that didn't fall apart if it weren't directed by god > king > knight > peasant. If there was nothing holding it together, what then? Why wasn't it just going to disintegrate into chaos? If value wasn't dictated by something firm and solid, then what? Omigod! Omigod! Omigod! And so when some of these guys started studying it all, they examined "unintended consequences".
Anyway, if Kristol really took it as a law -- and I'd argue that Marx's own thought *does* take it as an operative law of social change for we'd pretty much never relieve ourselves of economic oppression and strive toward freedom without this "law" -- then Kristol and his followers wouldn't imagine that it would be possible for the US to be a force for change on the world stage. They take this too seriously for them to really believe that the law applies to anything other than certain kinds of politics. Their politics are immune from it. Otherwise, they would never have argued that there would be only good resulting from a US attack on Iraq. Unintended consequences would have to erupt from their own government meddling on the world stage. Instead of believing that flowers would be thrown at U.S. troops for saving da Iraqi people from Saddam, they should have imagined the unintended consequences of their liberatory (meddling) efforts. Ha ha ha.
In that sense, they are romantics not the realists they claim to be.
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