Hi all, I’m writing an essay on Marx & modern media and at one point I use Marx’s famous quote “Religion is the opiate of the masses”. I’ve finished the essay and am now doing the footnotes and I have to reference the quote. Trouble is, I’ve hardly read any Marx and have no idea where it comes from. You might think it odd that I have to reference a common figure of speech like that but my Uni is pathetically anal about that sort of thing and I know I’ll get penalised if I don’t reference it.
Can anyone please tell me the book or article which first contained the phrase “Religion is the opiate of the masses”? Needless to say Google has let me down.
FWIW 95% of my essay focusses on Neo-Marxism, specifically Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. I only cited Marx briefly to get some material for a quick introduction to Gramsci’s stuff. The writings of Marx himself are actually pretty useless when analysing modern media. It’s just that this damn quote illustrates one of my points perfectly and I’ve never actually come across it in my reading, I just picked it up somewhere. But I’ll check to see if there’s an online copy of the Manifesto and cite that.
:smack: After all that, I stumbled across the origin of the quote by chance on Wikipedia. Its from Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right:”