What a Hegemon’s Tolerance Reveals About Its Security
What happens to freedom of expression when a dominant political order begins to feel threatened? And what does the apparent tolerance of a powerful society tell us about the security of the power that permits it? Recent work extends these questions into the present: Tarlach McGonagle’s 2026 study in SAGE Journals maps the platformisation of public debate as a structural shift in where dissent is permitted, updating this formula for the algorithmic age, while the 2026 Cambridge University Press study “Silencing Dissent: Academic Freedom and Transnational Suppression of Palestinian Solidarity” in Perspectives on Politics shows how tolerance collapses precisely when dissent contests the legitimacy of a hegemonic alliance.
Professor Jorge Majfud’s proposed a formula for this old historical dynamic: P=d.t. Yet the idea becomes far richer when set alongside a broader group of scholars concerned with empire, colonialism, identity, knowledge, resistance, and the boundaries of speech. Rather than treating the formula as an isolated equation, it works best as a conceptual bridge connecting several intellectual traditions represented on Professor Press.
Secure Hegemon → High Tolerance (t)
Threatened Hegemon → Low Tolerance (t)
The Mechanics of the Formula
The basic proposition is deliberately simple:
- (P) represents hegemonic power
- (d) represents dissent, diversity, and freedom of expression
- (t) represents the power’s tolerance toward those forces
Solving for tolerance yields:
A secure hegemonic power can afford to tolerate considerable dissent. But as dissent (d) increases, tolerance (t) naturally declines unless the dominant power (P) grows proportionally stronger.
Majfud frames this as a dynamic balance of power. A hegemon that feels unthreatened has little reason to silence marginal critics; a hegemon confronting a genuine challenge has every incentive to restrict them. This echoes classic political realism: power yields leniency only while its primacy remains uncontested.
Confidence vs. Virtue
The value of P=d.t lies less in strict mathematical precision than in the uncomfortable question it forces us to confront: Is tolerance evidence of political virtue, or merely a byproduct of political confidence?
A confident empire permits criticism because that criticism poses no actual danger to its foundational structures. In fact, permitting outspoken critics can actively benefit the hegemon by projecting an image of an open, liberal society. The limits of that openness only become visible when dissent targets core pillars—its economic system, foreign policy, racial hierarchy, territorial claims, or official historical narratives.
Majfud traces this logic across history, pointing to recurring moments when political power became less tolerant of dissent: the prosecution of Socrates in a fragile post-war Athenian democracy; the systematic persecution of early Christian dissenters by the Roman Empire; the anti-communist purges and repression of McCarthyism during the Cold War; and, in the contemporary period, the growing use of legal and institutional mechanisms to restrict or marginalize forms of political criticism considered threatening to established power.
Power Beyond the State: Framing, Life, and Identity
Expanding P=d.t through critical theory shows that power operates far beyond simple state censorship.
Power (P) → Edward Said (Representation & Discourse)
Power (P) → Achille Mbembe (Necropolitics & Exclusion)
Power (P) → Judith Butler (Recognition & Norms)
Power (P) → Anthony Appiah (Passive Tolerance vs. Pluralism)
Edward Said (Representation as Speech): Said demonstrates that imperial power relies heavily on systems of representation. Orientalism exposed how Western knowledge production classified and governed colonized societies. In Majfud’s equation, “dissent” () is not just the right to voice an opinion; it is the capacity of marginalized communities to author their own narratives and describe their own reality.
Achille Mbembe (Necropolitics): Mbembe shifts the focus to sovereignty, violence, and the management of life itself. His concept of necropolitics asks how power decides who lives and who is exposed to death. A state can maintain a veneer of high tolerance () for mainstream discourse while simultaneously exercising lethal coercion over populations excluded from the political community.
Judith Butler (Precariousness and Recognition): Butler complicates the variable . Diversity is not a simple headcount of differing opinions; it is shaped by social norms that determine whose lives are “grievable” and whose identities are legitimate. Power (
) often defines what counts as “acceptable diversity” versus what gets labeled a “dangerous deviation.”
Kwame Anthony Appiah (Cosmopolitan Pluralism): Appiah distinguishes passive tolerance —allowing differences because they are deemed politically harmless— from genuine pluralism. True pluralism requires letting distinct communities participate in shaping the social order, directly shifting the power equilibrium rather than merely existing at its margins.
Structural Power, Empire, and Boundaries
Political freedom cannot be decoupled from economic and geopolitical realities.
| Scholar | Analytical Focus | Core Contribution to P=d⋅t |
| Atilio Borón | Structural Marxism | Formal political speech ( |
| Noam Chomsky | Propaganda & Media | Mass media manufactures consent, marginalizing ideas structurally without needing explicit state censorship. |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Black Radical Tradition | Grassroots movements and cultures of resistance reveal the precise thresholds at which hegemonic tolerance collapses into repression — making Black freedom struggle a stress test of liberal permissiveness. |
| Rashid Khalidi | Palestinian History & Geopolitics | Tolerance within the imperial metropole routinely coexists with occupation and exclusion at the periphery. |
| Julian Go | Postcolonial Sociology | Empire is not a historical memory but a structural foundation of modern political and social institutions. |
Digital Control, Institutional Power, and Narrative
In the contemporary era, the arena for P=d.t has migrated into digital networks, covert financial systems, and literary spaces.
Power in the modern world is rarely held in plain sight; it shifts continuously between physical institutions, digital infrastructures, and the subtle mechanics of culture. While early advocates envisioned digital networks as an inherently democratizing force that would dismantle traditional hierarchies, the reality has proven far more complex. As Kris Ruijgrok demonstrates, state and corporate entities adapted with remarkable speed to this new medium. Through algorithmic filtering, pervasive surveillance, and deliberate information control, these dominant actors have successfully reasserted authority over the digital sphere, turning tools of potential liberation into instruments of quiet discipline.
This digital control is mirrored in the hidden channels of global political economy. As J.C. Sharman’s work on illicit financial networks reveals, vast flows of capital routinely bypass formal democratic oversight, operating quietly behind the facade of transparent governance. Patrick Sheehy’s research reinforces this dynamic, showing that contemporary political conflict is increasingly shaped by these non-transparent, transnational frameworks. When economic and technological systems are governed by invisible rules, the public mechanisms of democracy are often left reacting to power rather than exercising it.
Faced with these grand structures of control, dissent often takes root in the domain of culture and narrative. The literary works of Eduardo Galeano, Isabel Allende, and Juan Rulfo show how storytelling serves as a crucial form of counter-power. Galeano’s chronicling of Latin American economic dependency, Allende’s preserved memories of life under dictatorship, and Rulfo’s focus on the echoes of marginalized voices all directly undermine official state mythology. By preserving alternative histories and restoring historical consciousness, narrative literature reclaims the human agency that formal power attempts to erase.
Ultimately, breaking these entrenched systems requires fundamentally rethinking what counts as truth itself. Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls for an “Epistemologies of the South,” directly challenging the Western monopoly on legitimate, authoritative knowledge. Santos argues that genuine cognitive justice and true intellectual diversity cannot be achieved while a single worldview dictates reality. By elevating suppressed, non-Western intellectual traditions, it becomes possible to dismantle ideological hegemony and imagine genuine alternatives to modern authority.
A Diagnostic Tool for Open Societies
Jorge Majfud’s P=d.t is not a rigid mathematical law, but a diagnostic tool. It reminds us that tolerance is dynamic and relational —it expands, contracts, and shifts alongside underlying power dynamics.
When a democracy becomes visibly intolerant during moments of geopolitical, economic, or cultural stress, that contraction is rarely a simple cultural regression. It is a structural symptom showing that established institutions feel their core dominance threatened.
Ultimately, the true test of an open society is not how much criticism it permits when that criticism is harmless, but how much dissent it tolerates when that dissent has the actual power to shift the balance of power itself. Professor Press’s intellectual profiles provide a vital roadmap for navigating this balance across history, theory, literature, and modern politics.
Majfud has used P=d.t not just as a diagnostic lens but as a forecasting instrument. Because the formula describes a structural equilibrium (P − d·t = 0), any deviation from that balance predicts movement: a rising power will expand tolerance to project confidence; a declining or threatened power will contract it to contain risk.
Years before current geopolitical tensions crystallized, Majfud argued in lectures —later summarized in his book P = d.t: Outline of a Theory of Power— that the formula predicted two diverging trajectories. For China, as its hegemonic power (P) grew, the formula projected an increase in its tolerance of certain forms of dissent and diversity —not out of liberalism, but as a strategic display of confidence to legitimize its rising global role. For the United States, facing challenges to its unipolar dominance, the formula predicted the opposite: a progressive decrease in tolerance —more surveillance, more institutional repression of dissent, more rhetorical nationalism— not because of ideology, but because a hegemon that feels threatened mathematically cannot afford openness. Majfud summarized this in a striking inversion: the country historically associated with freedom of expression would grow less tolerant, while the one historically associated with repression would selectively open up —both movements dictated not by values but by the cold logic of power.
For a deeper engagement with the formula’s development and applications, readers are invited to consult Majfud’s original sources: P = d.t: Outline of a Theory of Power and his essay Power’s Tolerance of Dissent in Open Societies.
Sources
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. W. W. Norton, 2006.
Borón, Atilio. Empire and Imperialism: A Critical Reading of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Zed Books, 2005.
Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso, 2004.
Chomsky, Noam, and Edward S. Herman. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Pantheon Books, 1988.
Go, Julian. Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory. Oxford University Press, 2016.
Kelley, Robin D.G. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Beacon Press, 2002.
Khalidi, Rashid. The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. Metropolitan Books, 2020.
Majfud, Jorge. P = d.t: Outline of a Theory of Power. Humanus, 2025
Majfud, Jorge. “Power’s Tolerance of Dissent in Open Societies.” majfud.org, 2025. Read
Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture, 15(1), 2003.
McGonagle, Tarlach. “Techtonic Shifts in Public Debate: A New Battlefront for Freedom of Expression.” SAGE Journals, 2026. Read
Said, Edward. Orientalism. Pantheon Books, 1978.
“Silencing Dissent: Academic Freedom and Transnational Suppression of Palestinian Solidarity.” Perspectives on Politics. Cambridge University Press, 2026. Read
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