Biography of Karl Marx
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 and Berlin,Marx was greatly influenced by the philosophy of Hegel.While Marx was impressed with the Hegelian professors under whom he studied,he ultimately found himself attracted to a group of students known as the "Young Hegelians." This group of young iconoclasts,including David Strauss,Bruno Bauer,and Max Stirner,were inspired by Hegel but were determined to champion the more radical aspects of the old master's system.In particular,these Left Hegelians called into question the conservatism they saw in Hegel's avowed political and religious philosophies.Although Marx desired a career as an academic at the time,his political sympathies prevented him from receiving an position in the state-controlled university system.Instead,Marx turned to journalism where his radical politics attracted the attention of Prussian censors.The publication for which he worked was shut down for its politically incorrect commentary,and the frustrated Marx traveled to Paris
