Alberto Edwards Vives lived in a period in which the ruling oligarchy in Chile had fallen into a social and political attitude of frivolity and neglected the public affairs. This situation deeply affected him. In several of his essays written between 1903 and 1927, he made an analysis of the history of the republican Chile where he held the opinion that the best period of it were the authoritarian decades, becau- se a brilliant statesman, Diego Portales imposed the principle of authority that allowed the Chilean XIX century to be an epoch of progress and order in open contrast with the reality people were living at the beginning of the XX century. The historic essay where he best expressed these ideas was La Fronda Aristocráti- ca, that nevertheless, did not reflect a very new view. Edwards had already expres- sed those ideas in previous essays. The intellectual contribution of La Fronda arises from the fact that he picks up the ideas of several foreign authors, specially Oswald Spengles’s, whose categories of historical analysis Edwards explicity em- ployed. In this paper they are analyzed one by one as far as they constitute the basis of the book.