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"Opium of the people" or "opium of the masses" () 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's role is as a metaphysical balm for the real suffering in the universe and in society.

This statement was translated from the German original, "" and is often rendered as "religion[...] is the opiate of the ." The passage from Marx translates (including italics) as: "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the of the people."

The passage occurs in an article published in February 1844, in Marx's own journal , a collaboration with Arnold Ruge. The article was the introduction to a book-length work, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, begun in 1843 (the year following the conclusion of the first imperialist Opium War in south China) but not published until after Marx's death. While the sentence (really bits of two sentences, mushed together) is often quoted, its context has received much less attention.

Full quotation and history

Marx wrote this passage in 1843 as part of the introduction to Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, a book that criticized philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's 1820 book, Elements of the Philosophy of Right. This introduction was published in 1844 in a small journal called ; however, the book itself was published posthumously. As the journal had a print run of just 1,000 copies, it had no popular effect during the 19th century. The phrase became better known during the 1930s, when Marxism became more popular. In his view, religion, although false, is a function of something real. Specifically, Marx believed that religion had certain practical functions in society that were similar to the function of opium in a sick or injured person: it reduced people's immediate suffering and provided them with pleasant illusions which gave them the strength to carry on. In this sense, while Marx had no sympathy for religion itself, he has deep sympathy for those proletariat who put their trust in it. alluded to Marx's earlier comments:

Kim Il Sung

North Korean leader Kim Il Sung's writings addressed the "opium" metaphor twice, both in the context of responding to comrades who object to working with religious groups (Chonbulygo and Chondoism). In the first instance, Kim replies that a person is "mistaken" if they believe Marx's proposition regarding "opium of the people" can be applied in all instances, explaining that if a religion "prays for dealing out divine punishment to Japan and blessing the Korean nation" then it is a "patriotic religion" and its believers are patriots.

In other academic work, Robin Dunbar has used the idea of religion being "the opium of the people" to suggest that group religious practice may lead to the body's natural release of endogenous opioids, known as endorphins. Multiple studies have been conducted attempting to test this hypothesis. In one such series of studies, Sarah Charles found evidence that religious ritual did lead to the release of endogenous opioids, which was directly linked to participants' feelings of bonding during the group religious practice.

Similar statements and influence

The same metaphor was used by many authors around the 19th century.

In 1798, Novalis wrote in ('Pollen'):

In 1840, Heinrich Heine also used the same analogy, in his essay on Ludwig Börne:

The writings of Bruno Bauer are a key influence on the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. Marx's metaphor is anticipated in two of Bauer's works: and . In the former work, Bauer talks of religion as a cause of "opium-like stupefaction;" in the latter, Bauer mentions theology's "opium-like" influence.

Charles Kingsley, a canon of the Church of England, wrote the following in 1847, four years after Marx:

Miguel de Unamuno

Miguel de Unamuno, the Spanish author of the Generation of '98, focused his nivola around the theme of religion's opiatic effect on the people of rural Spain. In the book, the protagonist Don Manuel is a priest who does not believe in God, but continues preaching because he sees the positive impact he can make in the lives of his parishioners. Religion in this way also serves to cure his own deep depression, through the happiness he feels from helping the people of Valverde de Lucerna. Unamuno makes direct reference to Marx when Don Manuel explains:

Modern comparisons

Some writers make a modern comparison of the phrase "opium of the people" to that akin to sports fandom, celebrities, the distractions of television, the internet, and other entertainment, etc. This can be seen as a parallel to the concept of bread and circuses.

In 2016 in the Atlantic and on the PBS show hosted by Charlie Rose, prior to being elected senator or nominated to be Donald Trump's running mate, JD Vance called Trump "cultural heroin" and "an opioid of the masses."

See also

  • Criticism of religion
  • Antireligion
  • Faith and rationality
  • God helps those who help themselves
  • Marxism and religion
  • Marxist–Leninist atheism
  • Noble lie
  • The Opium of the Intellectuals

References

Further reading

  • Abrams, M. H. [1934] 1971. The Milk of Paradise: The Effect of Opium Visions on the Works of De Quincey, Crabbe, Francis, Thompson, and Coleridge. New York: Octagon.
  • Berridge, Victoria and Edward Griffiths. 1980. Opium and the People. London: Allen Lane
  • Marx, Karl. 1844. "Introduction | A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right." Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, February.
  • McKinnon, Andrew M. "Reading ‘Opium of the People’: Expression, Protest and the Dialectics of Religion." Critical Sociology 31(1/2)
  • O’Toole, Roger. 1984. Religion: Classic Sociological Approaches. Toronto: McGraw Hill
  • Rojo, Sergio Vuskovic. 1988. "La religion, opium du people et protestation contre la misère réele: Les positions de Marx et de Lénine." Social Compass 35(2/3):197–230.
  • Luchte, James. 2009. "Marx and the Sacred." The Journal of Church and State 51(3):413–37.