The Catholic Worker, Dorothy Day, and Exemplary Anarchism^19“anarchism has a broad back, like paper it endures anything,”
one could hardly do better than to point to the existence of the
Catholic Worker movement.^1 Launched by Dorothy Day and
Peter Maurin on May 1, 1933, when the first issue of the Catholic
Worker was distributed to bemused radicals assembled in Union
Square, Manhattan, the Catholic Worker movement has from its
inception fused an anarchist sensibility with intense Catholic piety.
Effecting that unlikely pairing required, to use the term employed
by one of the movement’s most perceptive scholars, nothing less
than “inventing” Catholic radicalism in the United States, where
Social Gospel Protestants had a near monopoly on faith-based
social activism in the early 20th century.^2 If the mystery of its very
existence were not enough, the unusual longevity of the Catholic
Worker raises questions as to what deeper lessons about social
movements might be contained in the Worker’s seemingly idiosyn-
cratic synthesis of disparate influences.
By no means can those lessons be illuminated comprehensively
in the space of this chapter. Instead, in what follows I will attempt
to draw attention to a feature of the movement that has garnered
much comment but little systematic exposition, a feature that goes
some way towards explaining how the Worker was able to find
an affinity between anarchist ideas and a specifically Catholic ver-
sion of the Christian faith. The concept that will underpin this
discussion is the concept of “exemplarity,” a concept whose flag-
ging philosophical reputation has begun to revive thanks to recent
scholarly work on the subject in the areas of philosophy, literary
criticism, rhetoric, pedagogy, and legal studies.^3 Exemplarity, I will
argue, played an instrumental role in shaping the Catholic Worker
movement’s self-conception and determining the manner of the
movement’s operation. After offering a brief history of the idea
of exemplarity from its roots in ancient philosophy, history, and
rhetoric to its incorporation into Christianity, I will examine its
place in the founding vision for the Catholic Worker as fleshed out
by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin in the early 1930s. The ideal
of contemporary sainthood that informed the Worker’s activities
was, I maintain, informed by interpretations of central Christian
figures like Christ, the saints, and the figure of the “holy fool” that
placed special emphasis on their exemplary qualities. I will then
consider whether Day, the Worker’s de facto leader, consistently