This dissertation proposes an analysis of how the idea of Itamaraty’s ‘tradition’ is constructed through the production of a diplomatic intellectual history as part of the process of the making of institutional memory. The idea of a ‘tradition’ plays several roles when it is used as a concept and/or as an analytical tool in political speech. It has the power to convey legitimacy to political decisions by establishing connections with an ideational and conceptual body and to provide a sense of continuity to the widely understood foundational moments of Brazilian foreign policy. Therefore, it is essential to this idea that the various projects of international insertion come to be dissociated from contingency and political competition. Through the study of the concepts employed by Rio Branco, Joaquim Nabuco e Manuel de Oliveira Lima, we can turn back the personages into agents when we start to understand their production as constrained as well as turned possible by the political competition for different political projects inside the institution. Then we can see how the change is understood in terms of continuity, in which the previously victorious concepts are re-signified to be absorbed by the new political projects in dispute. The Independent Foreign Policy was then constructed as a phase in the process of development of panamericanism and it has been understood since the early 1980s as a time of fundamental change. In this continuous process, the idea of ‘tradition’ is always re-interpreted as part of the institutional memory and, therefore, as the base to present political choices.