By Kenneth Maxwell

At about 9:45 on the morning of November 1, 1755, All Saints Day, the earth beneath Lisbon began to move. The churches were full. Many of the faithful were at mass when the vaults and walls came down on the congregations. “I could hardly take a step without treading on the dead and dying,” one eyewitness recalled.

Today is the 271st anniversary of the Great Earthquake of Lisbon. It was the most powerful earthquake to strike the continent of Europe in recorded history, probably the equivalent of 8.5 to 9 on the Richter scale. Its source lay several hundred miles off the southwest coast of Portugal, along the fault that marks the boundary between the African and Eurasian plates. A segment of that fault, somewhere between 150 and 600 kilometers long, thrust upward by as much as ten meters, releasing energy at least three times greater than the eruption of Krakatoa.

Then came the sea. A tsunami, very rare in the Atlantic, struck the city. Then came fire, which took hold and consumed much of what was left.

The destruction fell hardest on the Baixa, the low-lying commercial heart of Lisbon built over alluvial landfill between steep hills. The riverfront quay sank and disappeared. The Royal Palace, the Customs House, the India House and the Royal Shipyard, all built hard against the Tagus, were destroyed. So was the new Patriarchal Church, and so was the magnificent Opera House, inaugurated only months earlier, on March 30, the Queen’s birthday. Some fifty-five convents and monasteries were severely damaged. The British consul wrote to London in December that the waterfront district was “nothing but a heap of rubbish, in many places several stories high, incredible to those who are not eyewitnesses of it.”

Lisbon at that moment was one of the great ports of the world. Into it flowed pepper from India, porcelain and silk from China, and sugar, diamonds and gold from Brazil. In a single morning its ceremonial and commercial core ceased to exist. Estimates of the dead vary. But between 15,000 and 30,000 people died.

Europe Asks Why

The earthquake shook more than buildings. It shook the European mind.

Many were quick to assign blame. For the Jesuit Father Gabriel Malagrida, the catastrophe was the wrath of God, retribution for the sins of Lisbon. Voltaire, for whom Portugal was the perfect emblem of superstition and irrationality, turned the disaster against the comfortable optimism of the philosophers. In his Poem on the Lisbon Disaster, or an Examination of the Axiom “All Is Well,” he wrote:

“Oh, miserable mortals! Oh, wretched earth!
Oh, dreadful assembly of all mankind
Eternal sermon of useless sufferings!
Deluded philosophers who cry, ‘All is well.'”

Rousseau answered him, and his answer still repays reading. “Would you have preferred that this earthquake had taken place in a desert rather than in Lisbon?” he asked. Must nature be subject to our laws, so that “in order to prevent her from causing an earthquake in any particular place all we need to do is build a city there?” Rousseau’s point was that the disaster was natural, but the scale of the suffering had human causes: where and how people had built.

The shock reached across the Atlantic as well. On November 18, an earthquake struck Massachusetts east of Cape Ann. In Boston the worst damage was where buildings stood on landfill near the wharves, just as in the Baixa. John Adams, at Braintree, wrote in his diary that his house seemed “to rock and reel and crack as if it would fall in ruins.” At Harvard, Professor John Winthrop lectured on earthquakes in the college chapel on November 26, with approving reference to the “very ingenious Mr. Franklin of Philadelphia.”

In Britain, George II asked the House of Commons for “speedy and effectual relief,” and Parliament appropriated £100,000 in specie, provisions and tools. Portugal was Britain’s oldest ally and, since the Methuen Treaty of 1703, a vital trading partner. Lisbon’s ruin was a British concern.

The Practical Response

In Lisbon itself, the reaction was more prosaic and far more practical.

King Dom José I had shown little interest in government, preferring hunting and the opera. He was at the palace at Belém, well west of the city center, when the shocks and the wave struck, but he was so terrified that for the rest of his life he refused to sleep in any building made of stone. The royal family camped in the gardens at Belém and later moved into a wood and canvas barracks, the barraca real, on the hill of Ajuda.

The man who acted was Sebastião José de Carvalho e Mello, the future Count of Oeiras and Marquês de Pombal. He had served as Portuguese ambassador in London from 1739 to 1743, living on Golden Square, and had been elected to the Royal Society, sponsored by among others Sir Hans Sloane. He had then served in Vienna. He came to the crisis with a mind shaped by the practical, utilitarian outlook of the English Enlightenment.

His response was immediate and draconian, summed up in the phrase long attributed to him: “bury the dead and feed the living.” In his own spidery handwriting, he set out three priorities. First, dispose of the dead to prevent disease. Second, feed the survivors, imposing ceilings on the price of bread to deter speculators. Third, restore public order.

He persuaded the Patriarch of Lisbon to allow bodies to be collected, loaded into boats and dropped into the Atlantic without funeral rites. He brought in troops from the hinterland. He gave magistrates power to act instantly against murder and looting; according to one eyewitness, some eighty gibbets soon stood across the city.

It is sometimes claimed that Pombal took credit afterward for measures others devised. The documentary record says otherwise. In the Houghton Library at Harvard there is a handwritten draft of a decree in Pombal’s hand, written at Belém on November 3, 1755, threecommercia days after the earthquake. The measures were later compiled in the volume known as the Providências: the collection of corpses, the avoidance of food shortages, care of the sick and wounded, temporary price controls on essential foods, and planning for the reconstruction of the city.

A City Redesigned From the Ground Up

The ambitious young Scottish architect Robert Adam, then in Rome, saw the earthquake as “Heavenly judgement on my behalf.” He hoped to become royal architect of Lisbon and sketched a new city modeled on Bernini’s piazza before Saint Peter’s.

Pombal had something very different in mind. He did not call on the Italian, Austrian or French architects Portugal had so often used for its great public buildings, and he held no international competition. He turned instead to Portugal’s own military engineers: Manuel da Maia, the chief engineer of the realm, then nearly eighty; Eugénio dos Santos, a colonel in the engineering corps in his mid-forties; and Carlos Mardel, a Hungarian émigré who had come to Portugal to work on the Lisbon aqueduct, which survived the earthquake. These were men used to managing large works, materials and manpower.

Pombal froze all building and property sales until a master plan existed. Maia delivered his “dissertation” on December 4, 1755. He weighed whether debris should be used to raise the low ground, how tall buildings should be in relation to the width of streets, how to drain the lowlands against tidal flooding, and even whether the capital should be moved west toward Belém, where the subsoil was firmer. He studied two precedents: Turin, where a new city had been built alongside the old, and London, where Christopher Wren’s grand plan after the Great Fire of 1666 had been defeated by property rights and old street lines.

Here the King’s terror proved decisive. Because Dom José would not rebuild his palace on its old site, he surrendered the most valuable real estate in the city. If the King gave up his ground, it would be difficult for anyone else to refuse.

Of six plans drawn up, the most radical was adopted: the fifth, by Eugénio dos Santos and Carlos Mardel. It overrode the old street pattern and the old property lines completely. The royal Terreiro do Paço gave way to the Praça do Comércio, a square of commerce, government, customs and exchange, with identical arcaded buildings on three sides and pavilions of gleaming pedra lioz limestone on the river. The art historian Robert C. Smith wrote that this stone gave “Lisbon a glittering appearance not unlike Venice.” From the square, a grid of streets ran north to the rebuilt Rossio and Praça da Figueira. The result, Smith wrote, was one of the “greatest uniform architectural undertakings of the age of the enlightenment.”

Legislation in May 1758 provided for the assessment and reallocation of property, substituting geometric measurement for old locations so owners could be compensated. Loans were offered, and new owners had five years to build. Every plan, down to the smallest detail, bore Pombal’s signature.

Most important, the buildings were designed to survive the next earthquake. Each was built around the gaiola, a flexible wooden cage of diagonal trusses bracing a horizontal and vertical frame, set on piles of green pine. Firewalls divided the roofs. Doors and windows were standardized. Following the advice of António Nunes Ribeiro Sanches, the New Christian physician then living in Paris, the new city was planned for light, air and sanitation. Ribeiro Sanches argued that earthquakes had natural causes, and Pombal published and distributed his work. Malagrida, who preached divine wrath, was later denounced to the Inquisition and burned at the stake.

Reconstruction also became industrial policy. Standardized stone facings, ironwork, cut timber, mortar, quick-drying cement, glass and tiles all had to be produced at scale. Pombal used this demand to build up a Portuguese artisan class and placed an industrial suburb, with silk, ceramic and cotton works, where the aqueduct ended.

There is an English thread in this story that has been overlooked. Two merchants from Devon, where I now live, were critical collaborators. William Stephens held a monopoly to supply glass for the new windows. John Parminter, ruined by the earthquake, recovered by marketing a quick-drying cement for the new buildings; Parliament even passed an act permitting the duty-free export of Welsh culm to fire his kilns at Alcântara. And when the architectural historian John Harris looked at the Praça do Comércio in the 1960s, he found it strikingly similar to Inigo Jones’s Covent Garden. Eugénio dos Santos’s design for the north side of the square is almost identical to the north and west sides of Covent Garden. It is a curious historical irony that Wren’s unrealized plan for a mercantile London and Jones’s piazza should have helped shape Pombal’s commercial Lisbon and Inigo Jones piazza.

The Lessons of Three Cities

In The Tale of Three Cities, I set Lisbon beside London after the Great Fire and Paris under Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann. The comparison clarifies what Lisbon achieved.

London had a catastrophe and a brilliant plan, but not the political authority to override property. It was rebuilt in brick and stone on its old medieval street lines, and its streets remain much as they were before the fire. Paris had no single catastrophe; Haussmann’s transformation was driven by imperial will and ended in the disaster of 1870 and the Commune. Lisbon combined catastrophe, a practical plan, professional engineers and concentrated power, and the result still stands. Lisbon and Paris remain much as Pombal and Napoleon III envisioned them.

Yet Pombal’s Lisbon was long undervalued. Europe’s image of Portugal remained Voltaire’s, fixed by the execution of Malagrida and of the aristocrats accused of trying to assassinate the King in 1758, not by Ribeiro Sanches’s treatise on public health. An article on the reconstruction by the Abbé Correia da Serra arrived too late for the Encyclopédie. When I first lived in Lisbon in 1964, many Lisboetas still called the Praça do Comércio the Terreiro do Paço, though the palace had vanished two centuries earlier. The square served as a gigantic parking lot. Pombal’s tomb in the Igreja da Memória was unvisited. He had died ill and in disgrace, in internal exile, far from the city he had rebuilt.

Why the Anniversary Matters Now

The anniversary is not only an occasion for historical reflection. The fault that destroyed Lisbon in 1755 has not gone quiet.

On August 26, 2024, a magnitude 5.3 earthquake struck about 60 kilometers off Sines and was felt across greater Lisbon, Setúbal and as far as Porto, according to The Portugal News. No one was hurt. A further 4.7 tremor shook the Lisbon area in February 2025, and the city’s mayor pointed to reviews of more than 1,400 buildings and the training of 700 engineers in seismic resistance, with the Baixa Pombalina a primary concern, as Portugal.com reported.

Portuguese specialists warn that Pombal’s gaiola can no longer be relied on to protect the Baixa. Francisco Mota de Sá of the Instituto Superior Técnico has noted that owners have altered the buildings at will, inserting steel beams and cutting through the timber cages to run gas, water, electricity and communications, according to Cadena SER. The protection designed in the 1750s has been eroded, piece by piece, by two and a half centuries of convenience.

That is the lesson of November 1, 1755, worth remembering tomorrow. Pombal and his engineers understood that the real test of a disaster is what follows it: whether a government can bury the dead, feed the living, keep order, and then build something that will withstand the next shock. Rousseau was right that the earthquake was nature’s work and the scale of the suffering was ours. The engineers who drew the Baixa took that lesson seriously. The question for Lisbon, and for every city that sits on a fault line or a floodplain, is whether we still do.

Note: Ken’s book contains the full text in English, Portuguese and French.

By Robbin Laird

When I published my recent piece carrying Alvin and Heidi Toffler’s thinking forward into today’s strategic environment, I hoped it would start a conversation.

I did not expect one of the most thoughtful responses to come from Deborah Westphal. Alvin Toffler recruited her to Toffler Associates in 1999, and she ran the firm as CEO from 2007 through 2018. Today she is CEO of the Karen Toffler Charitable Trust.

Her comment deserves to be quoted at length, because it captures what I was trying to say better than I said it:

“Their work was never simply about predicting what comes next. It was about understanding the forces of change, how they interact, and what those interactions mean for people and institutions.”

And further:

“Alvin and Heidi understood that we cannot anticipate every outcome, particularly when small changes can produce enormous consequences. And as they explored in Powershift, change also redistributes power, altering who has the knowledge, resources, and ability to act. That makes it important to learn to see emerging patterns, question assumptions, make connections across disciplines and experiences, and test our thinking through action.”

She also picked out the shift I believe matters most for anyone making strategy today: moving from asking “What will happen?” to asking “What capabilities do we need to adapt to whatever happens?”

That exchange made me want to step back from the Tofflers and look at the larger intellectual moment they belonged to.

From the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, a remarkable group of thinkers tried to understand the end of the industrial era and what would follow. Peter Drucker, Alain Touraine, Alvin and Heidi Toffler, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Daniel Bell came from different disciplines and often disagreed sharply. Taken together, though, they built the conceptual toolkit we still need for what I have called the age of chaos.

My argument is simple. We should read these thinkers not as forecasters to be graded on their predictions, but as analysts of the forces of change. Their real value lies in the questions they taught us to ask. Those questions matter more now than when they were first posed.

A Remarkable Five Years

The cluster of work is striking when laid out in sequence.

In 1969, Peter Drucker published The Age of Discontinuity. He identified four discontinuities reshaping economy, politics and society: new knowledge technologies, the move from an international to a world economy, a society of pluralistic organizations, and the rise of the knowledge society. The book is where he developed the idea of the “knowledge economy.”

That same year, the French sociologist Alain Touraine published La société post-industrielle, translated into English in 1971 as The Post-Industrial Society. It was one of the first book-length treatments of the concept.

In 1970, Alvin and Heidi Toffler published Future Shock, which sold millions of copies and gave the public a vocabulary for the human experience of accelerating change.

Also in 1970, Zbigniew Brzezinski published Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era, prepared under the auspices of Columbia’s Research Institute on Communist Affairs.

In 1973, Daniel Bell published The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting, the book most closely associated with the term itself.

These were not members of one school. Bell, in a later interview, dismissed Future Shock with a pun, calling it “future schlock,” while acknowledging that Herman Kahn and the Tofflers had popularized ideas he had developed. Touraine, a man of the European left, emphasized conflict and domination where Bell saw a more orderly, technocratic transition. Brzezinski was a geopolitical thinker focused on America’s role in the world and the competition with the Soviet Union. Drucker was a management thinker focused on organizations and the people who work in them.

That diversity is the point. Read together, they triangulate the transition from several directions at once.

Westphal’s comment calls for making “connections across disciplines and experiences,” and this body of work shows what that looks like in practice.

Five Questions We Inherited

Each of these thinkers left us a question that remains central to strategic thinking today.

Drucker: What if the trend lines break?

Drucker’s core insight was that the real world had moved out from under the intellectual frameworks built to describe it. As a 1969 review in Commentary summarized his argument, these discontinuities “make it impossible to predict the future, because prediction inevitably involves a forward projection of current trends.” Yet unless we understand them, we cannot solve the problems in front of us.

That is the founding premise of chaos management. Strategic planning in Western defense establishments still too often extends today’s trends into tomorrow’s budget lines. Drucker warned more than half a century ago that the decisive changes are the ones that break trends, not the ones that continue them. The return of high-intensity war in Europe, the speed at which drones have reshaped the battlefield, and the collapse of assumptions about stable supply chains are all discontinuities in Drucker’s sense.

Drucker also posed a challenge that still defines the institutional problem: “To make knowledge work productive will be the great management task of this century, just as to make manual work productive was the great management task of the last century.” Swap “knowledge work” for “data-enabled operations” and you have the central challenge facing every military service trying to field AI-enabled systems today.

Bell: What is knowledge, and who uses it to decide?

Bell argued that post-industrial society would be organized around “theoretical knowledge as the axis around which new technology, economic growth and the stratification of society will be organized.” More useful today is his distinction among data, information and knowledge. Data describes the empirical world. Information organizes data into meaningful patterns. Knowledge is the use of information to make judgments.

That three-part distinction is exactly what gets lost in current enthusiasm about artificial intelligence. Data precedes AI, but judgment comes after it, and judgment is still a human and institutional act. A force that collects vast amounts of data without the organizational capacity to turn it into judgment has not entered the knowledge era. It has only digitized its confusion.

Touraine: Who controls the programming?

Touraine called the new order a “programmed society,” in which power rests on control over the production and processing of information. Domination works less through coercion than through what he described as a system that “seduces, manipulates, and enforces conformism.” Critics at the time noted that where Bell played down conflict, Touraine put alienation, tension and resistance at the center.

Touraine reads today like a guide to the information environment of the 2020s. Authoritarian states have built programmed societies in a far more literal sense than he imagined, combining surveillance, information control and industrial policy. Democracies face their own version of the problem through polarization, platform power and the fragmentation of shared facts. Touraine reminds us that the knowledge society is a contested field, not a neutral one.

Brzezinski: Can the world grow more connected and more fragmented at once?

Brzezinski, my mentor at Columbia, opened Between Two Ages with a sentence that has only grown more relevant: “The paradox of our time is that humanity is becoming simultaneously more unified and more fragmented.”He described a “technetronic” society shaped “culturally, psychologically, socially, and economically by the impact of technology and electronics, particularly in the area of computers and communications.”

He also saw that an electronically connected world would make populations more susceptible to mass mobilization, and that global problems would outrun the nation-state system. The contested global order we now live in, where connectivity spreads both cooperation and disruption, is the paradox he identified, playing out at scale.

The Tofflers: Can people and institutions keep pace?

The Tofflers defined future shock as “the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.” Alvin Toffler later described his trilogy as a progression: Future Shock looked at the process of change, The Third Wave at its direction, and Powershift at its control.

Powershift, the book Westphal singles out, is the one strategists should reread now. Toffler argued that power rests on a triad of violence, wealth and knowledge, and that the most important shift of all is “the hidden shift in the relationship between violence, wealth, and knowledge as societies speed toward their collision with tomorrow.”

That is a precise description of modern conflict. Cheap drones redistribute violence. Sanctions and industrial policy weaponize wealth. Information operations and AI contest knowledge. These three are no longer separate domains. They convert into one another continuously.

What They Missed

Honoring these thinkers means being clear about where their frameworks fell short.

First, much post-industrial thought carried a strong strain of technocratic optimism. A recent assessment of Bell notes that by treating theoretical knowledge and expertise as society’s organizing principle, he underestimated how much economic power and political interest would continue to shape who controls that knowledge and who benefits from it. The transition proved far less orderly than the technocratic version suggested.

Second, the word “post-industrial” encouraged a dangerous misreading in the West: that industry no longer mattered. The war in Ukraine has delivered a harsh correction. Munitions, shipbuilding, energy and mass production are once again strategic necessities. The age of chaos is not post-industrial in the sense of leaving industry behind. It demands that knowledge and industrial capacity work together. A society that can design advanced systems but cannot produce them at scale has learned only half the lesson.

Third, several of these thinkers assumed the transition would be led by advanced democracies. Brzezinski saw the Soviet Union stagnating because it could not master the computer age. He was right about the Soviet Union, but the next generation of authoritarian powers has learned to combine technological sophistication with centralized control. The knowledge era did not settle the competition between political systems. It intensified it.

None of this undermines the thinkers. It makes clear what we need to add.

The 1970s gave us the analytical frame.

The age of chaos supplies the conditions under which that frame must now be applied.

From Prediction to Capability

This brings me back to Westphal’s comment and the reframing she highlighted.

The post-industrial thinkers are often remembered as futurists, and futurists are usually judged by whether their predictions came true. That is the wrong test. As Westphal puts it, their work “was never simply about predicting what comes next.” The more useful test is whether they helped people and institutions build the capacity to act under conditions no one could fully anticipate.

By that standard, their legacy suggests four capabilities that any serious strategy for the age of chaos must develop. Each corresponds closely to what Westphal named in her comment.

Seeing emerging patterns. Drucker’s discontinuities and Brzezinski’s paradox of unity and fragmentation were attempts to perceive structure in change before it became obvious. Institutions need systematic ways to detect weak signals rather than waiting for strong ones.

Questioning assumptions. Every one of these thinkers challenged the dominant intellectual frameworks of their time. Organizations need the culture and the processes that allow assumptions to be challenged before reality challenges them.

Connecting across disciplines and experiences. The value of this generation lies in reading a sociologist, a management theorist, a geopolitical strategist and a pair of futurists side by side. Defense organizations, structured around platforms and services, are often poorly built for that kind of synthesis. The kill web, the integration of distributed forces into an interactive whole, is in part an organizational answer to this challenge.

Testing thinking through action. Theory alone does not build adaptive capacity. Experimentation, exercises and the rapid fielding and refinement of new capabilities are how institutions learn. The forces that have adapted fastest in recent conflicts treat operations themselves as a learning process.

The Human Dimension

The final point in Westphal’s comment may be the most important. She wrote that “so much of our ability to adapt depends on people, the relationships between them, and their willingness to learn from one another.”

That brings the argument full circle.

Future Shock was ultimately a book about people: what accelerating change does to individuals, families and communities. Drucker’s knowledge workers were people whose motivation, he insisted, had to come from within. Touraine’s concern was the human subject resisting the programmed society. Even Brzezinski, the most geopolitical of the group, worried about whether modern societies would lose their social and moral cohesion under the pressure of technological change.

In an era dominated by talk of autonomous systems, artificial intelligence and data, it is easy to lose sight of this.

But the side that adapts best in the age of chaos will not simply be the side with the most advanced technology.

It will be the side whose people can listen, learn, trust one another and act together under stress.

Social cohesion is not a soft add-on to strategy.

It is the foundation that makes adaptive capacity possible.

Conclusion

The post-industrial thinkers of the 1970s were writing about the end of one era and the uncertain beginning of another. That is where we are again.

The difference is that today’s transition is unfolding in a contested global order, under the pressure of war, with technologies that move faster than our institutions can absorb.

We do not need to agree with everything Bell, Drucker, Touraine, Brzezinski or the Tofflers concluded. They did not agree with one another.

What we need is their habit of mind: treating change as a set of interacting forces to be understood rather than a single future to be predicted, and treating the ability to adapt as the decisive capability.

Deborah Westphal’s forthcoming book, The Pulse of Tomorrow: How Future Shock Still Shapes Our World, scheduled for March 2027, promises to tell the story of how the Tofflers developed that way of thinking.

It arrives at the right moment.

As her comment on my article reminds us, the question is no longer what will happen.

It is whether we are building the people, institutions and relationships that can deal with whatever does.

From Future Shock to the Age of Chaos: Carrying Alvin Toffler’s Question into a World of Contested Order