The political philosophy of Karl Marx can be considered one of the most powerful forces of secularization in nineteenth-century European society. It essentially instructed people to become materialists.
Belief in the hereafter was a means of social control; an "opiate of the masses." A
s a member of the Young Hegelians, he devoutly adhered to the basic tenets of Georg Hegel's philosophy of history. Marx believed that history could be understood as a rational progression, and thus, it could also be explained scientifically.