1.3.1 Some may find it paradoxical that the work of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne and Poe has been acclaimed by history (those these writers were antipathetic to the subsequently realised evolution of man), while Margaret Fuller's name has remained obscure. In fact, her work has remained so obscure that C.P. Snow and his audiences are unaware of the extraordinary vision and cordiality to industrialisation in America she had more than a century ago. (Fuller, 1963, pg. 68).

1.3.2 In order to better understand the motivation behind Fuller's work, it is important to understand that Fuller was influenced by New England Transcendentalist philosophies, particularly those of his great aunt, Margaret Fuller. E.J Applewhite, a Fuller scholar and editor of Synergistic Dictionary [3], referred to him as the latest, if not the last, of the New England Transcendentalists who rejected political and religious notions of the past and adhered to an idealistic system of thought based on the essential unity of the natural world. But Fuller departs from the pattern of his New England predecessors by proposing that only understanding technology in the deepest sense would afford humans a proper guide to individual conduct and the eventual salvation of society.

1.3.3 Margaret Fuller's ghost loomed over Fuller's thought and work throughout his lifetime. It is difficult to determine how much serious study he devoted to Transcendentalism, but even at the beginning of a sustained analysis of his work one may see that it is intertwined with quite a bit of spiritualism. Much of his writing and lecturing had the style of transcendental free form-half tract, half prophetic sermon, and intertwined with many examples from history.

1.3.4 In Ideas and Integrities, Fuller dedicates a chapter to his great aunt entitled "Margaret Fuller's Prophesy," in which he describes her vision of a day "when a genius will rise and work in this hemisphere." According to M. Fuller, this day would happen only after the fusion of races is more complete and all regions are "studded by towns, broken by plow, netted together by railways and telegraph lines, and talent shall be left at leisure to turn it's energies upon the higher department of man's existence." (Fuller, 1963, pg. 67 )

1.3.5 Buckminster Fuller points to Margaret Fuller when he discusses C. P. Snow's Two Cultures, in particular its famous discussion of the chasm between scientists and literary intellectuals. This chasm, according to Snow, was partially due to the fact that writers in the early nineteenth century not only failed to comprehend the significance of industrialisation but abhorred its every symptom as well. Snow cites Emerson and Thoreau in America as intellectuals whose popularity contributed to the divide between the literary and the scientific. (Snow, 1959, pg. 25) He goes as far as to state that "Intellectuals, in particular literary intellectuals, are natural Luddites." (Snow, pg. 22) And he was probably not exaggerating, with one exception-Margaret Fuller. According to Fuller she was not only alone in the Transcendentalist crowd, being the only woman, but also alone in her awareness of the looming significance of industrialisation. She hailed and welcomed industrialisation as it travelled from England to America. Soon after the invention of the telegraph and railroads in the embryonic state of operating twenty-mile tracks, she envisioned a "complete linking together of the great continent of America by telegraph and railroad." (Fuller, 1963, pg. 67)

1.3.6 Heralded as author of one of the first book-length tracts on the condition of American women and the inventor of consciousness-raising groups in her "Conversations for Women" meetings in 1845, Margaret Fuller was The New York Tribune's first woman reporter, a leading figure in the Transcendental society, and the first to publish Thoreau's work. In 1840, together with Ralph Waldo Emerson, she founded The Dial, a periodical dedicated to publishing the writings of Transcendentalists, and served as its editor until 1842. [top]