The work brings together the discipline of International Relations and Brazilian social thought in order to attempt to understand the ways that three key works on the formation of modern Brazil deploy the concept of the state. Its general hypothesis is that the use of this concept intertwines Brazil with world politics. The Masters and the Slaves and The Mansion and the Shanties by Gilberto Freyre, and Roots of Brazil by Sérgio Buarque de Holanda are analyzed with reference to how conceptual distinctions between state and society, state and outside, and past and present are applied in each of them. With regard to Gilberto Freyre s works, it is argued that the increased presence of the state in the 19th century unravels a particular framing of world politics that held sway in the colonial period, subjecting Eastern elements of the social landscape to an exclusive discourse of civilization, and constituting a new society that internalizes Europeanization norms. With regard to the work of Sérgio Buarque, it is argued that the coexistence of an ideal of rooting (that is, of putting down roots) with a condition of uprooting creates an interstice of irreconcilable conflicts in Brazilian history, in which the founding of a representative state is hampered by the difficulties that a recalcitrant past poses to the development of modern European institutions. The work concludes that the enunciation of conceptual distinctions in the three books deploys a discourse of limits, while simultaneously suggesting some spatio-temporal thresholds of Brazil s presence in the world.