Interpreting is, first and foremost, an act of creation. And this is how a series of authors, who make up what we call Brazilian social thought, have contributed to certain representations we have of Brazil. Starting from the lessons of sociologist Luiz Werneck Vianna, which ranged from the debates between americanists and iberists to the influence of Antonio Gramsci on our Social Sciences, in this essay we will go through the pages of some of the classics that reverberated throughout his intellectual career. My focus will be on the tensions between society and the state in the texts of Visconde do Uruguai, Tavares Bastos, Euclides da Cunha, and Gilberto Freyre, respectively. By contrasting them, we will see how Freyre broke with the essayists who preceded him and how Werneck Vianna left us a legacy of paths and questions that are instigating future research.