It has been said of Marx's personality that it was a mixture of the humdrum and the heroic, heavily weighted on the side of the heroic. His life was a similar mixture, heavily weighted on the side of the humdrum. Much of what Marx did, and most of what was clone to him, had its parallel in hundreds of other German lives in the first half of the nineteenth century; and the typical incidents, as distinguished from the exceptional ones, were evenly distributed over the whole of his life. He was born in 1818 in the town of Trier, into the family of a Jewish lawyer, and his early life and education were those of hundreds of other middle-class youths in Western Germany. On the material side there were the solid comforts of a society which had already recovered from the troubles of the Napoleonic wars and had not yet been thrown into the turmoil of the industrial revolution. Gymnasium and university followed as a matter of course; a professional and even a professorial career seemed to be predestined. On the cultural side there was the intellectual and artistic abundance of the 1830s. The period was one of transition, which, like many other periods of transition, enjoyed the best of both worlds; and it was on the best of both worlds that young Marx was reared.

From his father, a person of considerable culture, he obtained his knowledge of, and attachment to, the main tenets of eighteenth-century rationalism.