This thesis seeks to understand how Gilberto Freyre behaved as an intellectual during the troubled 1920s. Based on the texts Freyre wrote for the newspaper Diário de Pernambuco and the correspondence he exchanged with Oliveira Lima and José Lins do Rego, it asks how Freyre reacted to the crisis that was brewing in Brazil during the 1920s. It is based on the hypothesis that Freyre was profoundly affected by the context of crisis in which he found himself in the USA and post-war Europe, as well as by the crisis of the First Republic that he encountered on his return to Brazil in 1923. It was observed that in these three contexts there were cultural movements that questioned the general idea of Progress instilled by the ideologies of liberalism and positivism. His intellectual upbringing, together with the shock of finding his hometown changed by the modernization process underway, of which he had already been critical since the USA, converge in the texts he wrote for the newspaper. In these texts, it is possible to see Freyre as a social critic, accusing the evils of modernization, positivism, liberalism and democracy. The idea of generation as an analytical cut-off is based on Mannheim s theory, which relates the categories of intellectual and generation to moments of social transition; this choice was stimulated by the perception that Freyre himself adopted a generational narrative in his texts of the time. What can be seen from this research is that the young intellectual from Pernambuco, in the face of the crisis in the country, positioned himself as the voice of a great generation - the war generation. A role that he also identified in the intellectuals of Rio and São Paulo, embodied in a duty to correct the excesses of his parents generation, that is, the generation that founded the Republic. Based on Freyre s trajectory, this thesis reaffirms what other research has already pointed out: during this period there was an influx of various intellectual and artistic groups around the idea of a generation that had the responsibility of constituting the national identity. For the young man from Pernambuco, the blind search for Progress, which was achieved at the cost of traditions, had been in vogue until then. Therefore, for the constitution of this nationality, Freyre suggests in his texts the need for a creative return to the tradition of his grandparents, which had been denied by his parents generation. For him, national identity should be understood from the communion between regional particularities - the foundation of Regionalism.