Despite the wide use of the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC), both in information institutions in general and in library courses in Brazil, there is very little literature available in Portuguese that addresses the cultural, political and scientific questions and limits of its applications. It is even rarer to find literature that seeks to analyze the historicity of this instrument, and of the intellectual trajectory of its idealizer. This paper brings a brief review of reflections of the foreign literature with critical bias that search the historicity of the projects of Melvil Dewey for the American librarianship that marked the field history worldwide. It also seeks to understand the historical coverage and permanence of the use of CDD system.