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The Life Of Carl Marx

Karl Marx was born into a progressive and wealthy Jewish family in Trier, Germany. His father Heinrich, who had descended from a long line of rabbis, converted to Christianity, despite his many deistic tendencies. Marx's father was actually born Herschel Mordechai, but when the Prussian authorities would not allow him to continue practicing law as a Jew, he joined the relatively liberal Lutheran denomination. The Marx household hosted many visiting intellectuals and artists during Karl's early life.
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Education
After graduating from the Trier Gymnasium, Marx enrolled in the University of Bonn in 1835 at the age of 17 to study law, where he joined the Trier Tavern Club and at one point served as its president; his grades suffered as a result. Marx was interested in studying philosophy and literature, but his father would not allow it because he did not believe that Karl would be able to comfortably support himself in the future as a scholar. The following year, his father forced him to transfer to the far more serious and academically oriented Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin. During his stead, Marx wrote many poems and essays concerning life, using the theological language acquired from his liberal, deistic father, such as "the Deity." It was during this period that he absorbed the atheistic philosophy of the left-Hegelians. Marx earned a doctorate in 1841 with a thesis titled The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature.

The younger Karl Marx.
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Marx and the Young Hegelians
In Berlin, Marx's interests turned to philosophy, and he joined the circle of students and young professors known as the "Young Hegelians". For many of them, the so-called left-Hegelians, Hegel's dialectical method, separated from its theological content, provided a powerful weapon for the critique of established religion and politics. Some members of this circle drew an analogy between post-Aristotelian philosophy and post-Hegelian...