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The opium of the people or opium of the masses (German: Opium des Volkes) is a dictum used in reference to religion, derived from a frequently paraphrased partial statement of German revolutionary and critic of political economy Karl Marx: "Religion is the opium of the people." In context, the statement is part of Marx's analysis that religion ...
19th-century German philosopher Karl Marx, the founder and primary theorist of Marxism, viewed religion as "the soul of soulless conditions" or the "opium of the people". According to Marx, religion in this world of exploitation is an expression of distress and at the same time it is also a protest against the real distress.
The title of the book is an inversion of Karl Marx's famous dictum that religion is the opium of the people, and is a derivation from Simone Weil's quotation that "Marxism is undoubtedly a religion, in the lowest sense of the word. ... [I]t has been continually used ... as an opiate for the people." [1]
It [religion] is the opium of the people. [22] Thus for Marx atheist philosophy liberated men and women from suppressing their innate potential as human beings, and allowed people to intellectually understand that they possess individual human agency, and thus are masters of their individual reality, because the earthly authority of ...
Karl Marx [a] (German: [kaʁl maʁks]; 5 May 1818 ... the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The ...
The most well-known metaphor in Marx's Critique – that of religion as the opium of the people – is derived from the writings of the Young Hegelian theologian Bruno Bauer. [51] Bauer's primary concern is religious alienation. Bauer views religion as a division in Man's consciousness. Man suffers from the illusion that religion exists apart ...
Aron is best known for his 1955 book The Opium of the Intellectuals, the title of which inverts Karl Marx's claim that religion was the opium of the people; he argues that Marxism was the opium of the intellectuals in post-war France.
Marx (and Engels) considered religion as a component of the ideological superstructure of societies, and a pre-rational mode of thought, which nonetheless was wielded by ruling elites to obscure social relationships including the true basis of political power. In this latter sense, he described religion as "the opium of the people." [9]