Early Life
Edward Goldsmith (widely known as Teddy) was born in Paris in 1928 to a German-Jewish father, Frank Goldsmith, and French mother, Marcelle Mouiller.
He entered Millfield School, Somerset as a crammer student, and later graduated with honours in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Magdalen College, Oxford (1947–1950). While studying at Oxford, Goldsmith rejected the reductionist and compartmentalised ideas taught at the time, and sought a more holistic worldview with which to study societies and the problems facing the world at large.
After fulfilling his National Service as a British Intelligence Officer in Hamburg and Berlin, Goldsmith involved himself, unsuccessfully, in a number of business ventures, while devoting most of his spare time to the study of the subjects which were to preoccupy him for the rest of his life.
Throughout the 1960s he spent time travelling the world with his close friend John Aspinall witnessing firsthand the destruction of traditional societies, concluding that the spread of economic development, and its accompanying industrialisation, far from being progressive as claimed, was actually the root cause of social and environmental destruction.
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