Opium of the people
Religion as “the opium of the people ” is a statement by Karl Marx . The quote comes from the introduction to his work on the critique of Hegel's philosophy of law , written around the turn of the year 1843/44 . He published this introduction in 1844 in the magazine Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, which was edited together with Arnold Ruge . Often the quote is falsified in the version religion is opium used for the people .
Marx's Critique of Religion
Karl Marx initially joined Ludwig Feuerbach in his criticism of religion , as he wrote on May 10, 1842 in the Rheinische Zeitung about the Christian state parliament members from the knightly rank:
“Furthermore, because the real position of these gentlemen in the modern state in no way corresponds to the concept they have of their position, because they live in a world that lies beyond the real one , because the imagination is their heart and head, they take hold , unsatisfied in practice, necessary for theory, but for theory of the hereafter , for religion [...] "
As early as 1842, however, in several letters to Arnold Ruge , Marx criticized Feuerbach's form of criticism, for which religion was based only on personal experiences such as death, mortality and the desire for love. Instead, Marx attributed religion to the political conditions of society.
In the publication of 1844 he declared Feuerbach's criticism of religion for Germany as "essentially ended" and stated:
“The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion , religion does not make man. Religion is the self-confidence and self-esteem of people who have either not yet acquired themselves or have already lost them again. But the human being is not an abstract being crouching outside the world. Man, that is the world of man , state, society. This state, this society produces the religion, an inverted world consciousness , because they are an inverted world . Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritualistic point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its general reason for consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human being because the human being has no real reality. The fight against religion is thus indirectly the fight against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.
The religious misery is in one of the expression of real suffering and a the protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the mind of a heartless world, as it is the mind of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about one's condition is the demand to give up a condition that needs the illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in the germ the criticism of the Jammerthales, whose halo religion is. "
Marx presented his attitude to religion in detail in On the Jewish Question , which appeared in 1844 in the same issue of the Franco-German Yearbooks as a response to Bruno Bauer . In an even more fundamental form, relating not only to religion but also to philosophy itself, Marx wrote his criticism in 1845 in the theses on Feuerbach, which were unpublished during his lifetime .
origin
Religion has been criticized as priestly fraud since the 17th century , for example by Herbert von Cherbury . At the turn of the 18th century, Anthony Collins asserted in a sharper form that religion was all deceitful and influenced the French Enlightenment with his writings. For Julien Offray de La Mettrie , only atheism guarantees the well-being of humanity because religious wars are prevented. According to Claude Adrien Helvétius , religion is the deceived peoples' imagined interest in wanting to remain blind. According to Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach , an atheist destroys the “phantasms harmful to the human race”. For Voltaire , founders of religions are deceivers for the sake of rule; on the other hand, belief in God ensures the continued existence of human society. After the experiences of the terror of the anti-church French Revolution, religion's ambiguous social order function was taken more seriously than during the Enlightenment . Thus handed Pierre-Joseph Proudhon the saying of his uncle: "Religion is so necessary for people like the bread, it is so fatal to him like the poison."
With political reference, a similar statement appeared as early as 1797 as “This opium that you give your people” ( French “C'est de l'opium que tu fais prendre à ton peuple”) in the novel Juliette by Marquis de Sade . With this Juliette explains to King Ferdinand the consequences of his politics, which lead the people to ignorance instead of changing action. In Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 1761 novel Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloise , the heroine's husband is quoted as saying that religious devotion is “a kind of opium for the soul. Moderately used, cheered, animated and strengthened; too much will put you to sleep, make you angry, or even kill you. "
The opium as a means of seemingly pleasant numbness moved into the public European consciousness by the events in China, against England from 1839 to 1842 the First Opium War resulted. Another reason for the popularity of opium, besides the opium war, was its medical use. In surgery in 1846, anesthesia was introduced for all operations instead of only for major operations as before.
Helmut Gollwitzer was able to trace the idea that religion can and should be intoxicating back to Holbach. In a review , Johann Wolfgang von Goethe described the collected sermons of Friedrich Wilhelm Krummacher as “narcotic” . Friedrich Engels , Marx's companion, reported in his letters from Wuppertal in 1839 about religion and brandy as the common intoxicants. As an adjective, it has been proven that Bruno Bauer linked “opium-like” with religion for the first time . Moses Hess used opium, religion, and brandy in a common context in 1843.
Marx adopted his formulation in the introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right in 1844, possibly from Heinrich Heine , whom he had met in 1843. In 1840 Heine had published a memorandum for Ludwig Börne in which it sarcastically said: "Hail a religion that poured some sweet, soporific drops into the bitter goblet of the suffering human race, spiritual opium, a few drops of love, hope and faith!" Marx and Heine read the same authors critical of religion, besides Hess and Bauer also Feuerbach or Hegel. In front of them u. a. Kant and Herder already thought together religion (exercise) and opium.
Later use
The expression, also in the form of “Opium for the people”, has been used frequently up to the present day. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin interpreted the phrase "opium of the people" as the core of Marxist criticism of religion and formulated:
“The powerlessness of the exploited classes in the fight against the exploiters inevitably creates the belief in a better life in the hereafter, just as the impotence of the savage in the fight against nature creates the belief in gods, devils, miracles, etc. Religion teaches humility and long-suffering down below to those who work their whole life and suffer need, and consolation with the hope of heavenly reward. But those who live from the work of others, religion teaches benevolence down below, with which it offers them a very cheap justification of their entire exploitation and sells tickets for heavenly bliss at affordable prices. Religion is the opium of the people. Religion is a kind of spiritual booze in which the slaves of capital drown their human faces and their claims to a halfway decent life. "
The saying has become a popular word and is and was used in other contexts than just religion. However, critics of religion also use this phrase, even if they are not followers of Marx or are even hostile to communism .
literature
- Helmut Gollwitzer : The Marxist criticism of religion and the Christian faith. In: Marxismusstudien 4, 1962, pp. 14-19.
- Johannes Kadenbach: Karl Marx's understanding of religion. Munich 1970, p. 64 ff.
- Horst Robert Balz, Gerhard Krause, Gerhard Müller (Hrsg.): Theologische Realenzyklopädie. Volume 4, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1979, ISBN 3-11007714-0 .
- Sergio Vuscovic Rojo: La religion, opium du peuple et protestation contre la misère réelle: Les positions de Marx et de Lénine . In: Social Compass . vol. 35, no. 2/3 , 1988, pp. 197-230 .
- Andrew M. McKinnon: Reading 'Opium of the People': Expression, Protest and the Dialectics of Religion . In: Critical Sociology . vol. 31, no. 1/2 , 2005.
- Joachim Eberhardt: Religion as »the opium of the people«: A contribution to the history of ideas - with some new discoveries. In: German quarterly for literary studies and intellectual history. Volume 93, No. 3, 2019-9, ISSN 0012-0936, pp. 263-286, doi: 10.1007 / s41245-019-00080-4.
Web links
Edition according to MEW , Volume 1, pp. 378–391:
Individual evidence
- ↑ Karl Marx: Debates on freedom of the press and publication of the land-based negotiations, Rheinische Zeitung No. 130 of May 10, 1842, MEW , vol. 1, p. 47
- ↑ Wolfgang Jahnke : Historical Dialectics. Destruction of dialectical basic forms from Hegel to Marx , 1977, pages 450–451
- ↑ Italics in the original, based on a digitized version from Google Books , accessed on December 19, 2016
- ↑ a b c Theologische Realenzyklopädie , Volume 4, p. 408.
- ↑ Histoire de Juliette, ou les Prospérités du vice , 5th chapter.
- ^ Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Die Neue Heloise, or letters zeyer lovers, from a small town at the foot of the Alps . tape VI . Leipzig 1761, p. 148 .
- ↑ Christoph Drösser ( Right? ): Right? Borrowed drug . In: The time . No. 42, October 7, 2004
- ↑ Joachim Eberhardt: Religion as "the opium of the people": A contribution to the history of ideas - with some new finds . In: German quarterly for literary studies and intellectual history . tape 93 , no. 3 , August 2019, ISSN 0012-0936 , p. 263–286 , doi : 10.1007 / s41245-019-00080-4 ( online [accessed September 12, 2019]).
- ↑ http://www.marxists.org/deutsch/archiv/lenin/1905/12/religion.html