Throughout his academic career, Luiz Werneck Vianna consolidated a vast research agenda, without losing, however, the public vocation that excited his intellectual life. Member of a generation marked by the critical situation of the 1960s, the expert moved between political activism and professional activity in the Social Sciences, constructing a biography in which the life of the intellectual, his professional work and the urgency of the challenges mobilized by the situation immediately were together in an unavoidable way. The paper proposes a reinterpretation of the main subjects investigated by Werneck Vianna, associating their urgency with the context from which they were conceived. Three phases are indicated as possible paths for understanding his intellectual work: a first moment, comprising the period that extends from the end of the 1970s to the beginning of the 1990s; a second phase, which addresses the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s; and a third stage, which covers the period of resurgence of the country s political crisis, intensified after the demonstrations of June 2013. In his own way, the public intellectual sought to interpret the country, indicating new and old actors, transformations, permanence, challenges and possible paths, but, above all, disputing the meaning of the actor and the facts.