20 Essays in Anarchism and Religion: Volume 1
adhered to the logic of exemplarity in her exercise of authority
within the movement, given her reputation for authoritarianism
and her occasional assertions of direct control over the New York
Catholic Worker community and newspaper. Finally, I will argue
that in a number of important respects the idea of exemplarity
provides a more satisfactory framework than the Weberian theory
of “charismatic” leadership for assessing Day’s influence over the
movement and the continued flourishing of the movement after
her death.
In the course of this discussion I hope to deepen our under-
standing of the relationship of the Catholic Worker to the anar-
chist tradition by outlining one of the ways in which the Worker’s
Catholic faith was not, from an anarchist perspective, a liability
but rather a resource. Most importantly, the connection to the
exemplary tradition provided by Catholicism suggested a means
of exercising leadership and authority through the power of ex-
amples and voluntary emulation rather than coercion. In this way,
exemplarity brought to the movement coherence and direction
that it might not otherwise have possessed, without compro-
mising the autonomy and dignity of the movement’s members.
In highlighting the ability of exemplarity to reconcile these
sometimes-competing priorities, I hope to use the example of the
Catholic Worker movement to suggest some larger lessons for an-
archist thought and practice.
The Christian exemplum
Although the concept of exemplarity found fertile soil in the
Christian tradition, it did not originate there. In Greek thought
it can be discerned in the notion of the paradeigma, a term first
invested with philosophical significance by Plato. For Plato, pa-
radeigma referred to a model derived from the transcendent Forms
at the centre of his ontology. He used the term to connote a top-
down, general-to-particular relationship involving the appearance
of divine qualities in the world of phenomena, although sensible
objects could partake of the Forms only imperfectly.^4 In Aristotle’s
work on rhetoric, by contrast, the idea of paradeigma was treated
inductively, as a particular from which general conclusions could