"the law of unintended consequences"

[Jonathan Lighter]

This had been cited frequently in the news media for a number of years.
 Wacki even has an article on "unintended consequences" :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences It does not trace the
phrase itself, however.

Allegedly the longer phrase appears in Herbert Feis, Foreign Aid and
American Foreign Policy_ (N.Y.: St. Martin's, 1964), but I can't confirm
this. In fact, "search only" results from  Hathitrust make it seem
doubtful.  Someone needs to check the book itself.  Page number? Can't help
you.

The earliest ex. I can confirm appears in Theodore H. White's _In Search of
History_ (N.Y.: Harper, 1978), p. 304:  Which brings me to the last and
most unsettling lesson the Marshall Plan taught: a demonstration of what
learned* *historians call the Law of Unintended Consequences."

People have known about "unintended consequences"  since Oedipus at least,
but its stature as a "law" appears to be relatively recent.

White, of course, was a very prominent American journalist, just the sort
of writer to influence the "national conversation."

JL

--
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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