Karl Marx was born May 5, 1818, in Trier, the oldest city in Germany, which at that time was part of the Kingdom of Prussia. He was the third of nine children of a wealthy middle-class family and was privately educated by his father until 1830, when he started attending Trier High School. He spent his childhood in Bonn and Berlin. At the age of 17 he became a student in the law faculty at the University of Bonn and a member of the Young Hegelian Doctors’ Club, since the field of debate in Marx’s student days was around the main philosophical ideas of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Marx wrote a controversial dissertation “The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature,” which aimed ...