Karl Heinrich Marx was born on May 5th, 1818 in the city of Trier, Germany to a comfortable middle-class Jewish family. His father, a lawyer and ardent supporter of Enlightenment liberalism, converted to Lutheranism when Marx was only a boy in order to save the family from the discrimination that Prussian Jews endured at the time. Marx enjoyed a broad, secular education under his father, and found an intellectual mentor in Freiherr Ludwig von Westphalen, a Prussian nobleman with whom Marx discussed the great literary and philosophical figures of his day. Notably, it was Westphalen who introduced the young Marx to the ideas of the early French socialist Saint-Simon.
As a student in Bonn...
