Résumé en anglais

This article is a coda to the discussion triggered in this Journal by competing readings of the tv program Le Jeu de la mort, reproducing Stanley Milgram’s experience on submission. This show claimed to unveil the almighty influence of television on viewers and show participants. We consider most of the contributions as highly stimulating. The discussion, starting by the criticism of an outdated methodological framework, has shifted toward the questioning of the effects of beliefs and « dispositifs » (Foucault). Starting from a case study of television effects, this debate connects with other research works in progress among sociologists and historians. Among those research we would mention the building of a social history of ideas, the controversies between historians concerning war violence and crimes and the challenge that they suggest (or not) to the vision of a process of civilisation (Elias). Manichean oppositions do not fit with serious scientific discussions. Thus Terzi and Bovet’s vision of a great divide between an humanistic pragmatism and a critical sociology, condemned to be scientist, indifferent to misery and enemy of human freedom is not worth discussing. To make sense both of the conditions of submission and resistance, one must face the question of human freedom as an empirical stake, not as a metaphysical concept.