In 1882, having recently completed his monumental ten-volume biography of the Habsburg Empress, Maria Theresia, the great nineteenth-century Austrian liberal historian, Alfred von Arneth, was commissioned to write the biographical entry for the Empress's foreign minister in the forty-volume Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie. This brief biographical sketch of Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz-Rietberg inspired Arneth to begin research on a large-scale biography of the famous minister, but after two years the project was abandoned. A 200-page “fragment” of this projected biography was published after Arneth's death. It traced Kaunitz's youth and early political career, ending in 1750, three years before Kaunitz began his forty-year tenure of the Habsburg Foreign Office. Arneth abandoned the project because he began to realize that doing Kaunitz justice would require him to repeat virtually the entire ten-volume Maria Theresia biography over again. There was no doubt in Arneth's mind that Kaunitz was “the first and greatest” of Maria Theresia's political advisers whose influence extended “to virtually all branches of the political life [of the Monarchy],” so that a biography of him “certainly required no justification.” The task, however, was to be left to another generation.

The century that followed, however, while producing a number of thumbnail sketches and encyclopedia entries of varying quality, did not yield the larger study which “required no justification.”