Volume 33, Number 18 · November 20, 1986
The Don Quixote of Diplomacy
By Raymond Carr
The Count-Duke of Olivares: The Statesman in an Age of Decline
by J.H. Elliott
Yale University Press, 733 pp., $29.95
The Count-Duke of Olivares dominated Spanish domestic and foreign policies for twenty-two years. When Philip IV acceded to the throne in 1621, Olivares, already his mentor, soon became his chief minister and, as such, steadily increased his grasp over the cumbrous machine that attempted to govern Spain. Professor Elliott sets out to chronicle his intentions and his failures in a political biography some seven hundred pages long. It is a monument of scholarship almost unique in our time: there are 2,676 footnotes, almost all to sources in archives and intractable sources at that. Recent fashions in historiography have segmented history; Professor Elliott sees in the political biography of an eminent statesman an approach to 'total history,' reintegrating the disjecta membra strewn about by the specialists. Above all, Professor Elliott's narrative, by examining in scrupulous detail how and why decisions were taken, restores power politics to their proper place in history; and it was Olivares who took the decisions until he was worn out by the cares of office, sick in mind and body, and Philip IV allowed his servant to retire in January 1643. Elliott's book restores drama, tragic drama at that, to history, a discipline that has recently so often fallen into the hands of those whom Edmund Burke dismissed as 'sophisters, economists and calculators.'[1]
Review, 3401 words
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