The Catholic Worker, Dorothy Day, and Exemplary Anarchism^31relationship between benefactor and beneficiary (whose human
dignity was violated by being termed a “client” or a “case”) but
that demanded personal sacrifice and fostered personal develop-
ment. The Worker saw social change as inseparable from person-
al change: thus, “While trying to transform society...a Catholic
Worker was engaged in transforming himself as well.”^44 The de-
velopment of the self in this sense was personalistic rather than
individualistic: cultivating the personality was supposed to result,
in the words of the French philosopher and Catholic Worker sup-
porter Jacques Maritain, in “the generous self of the heroes and
saints.”^45 The philosophy of personalism helped to enrich, there-
fore, the links the Worker posited between exemplary personal
qualities, the striving for saintliness in everyday life, and the strug-
gle for social change.
Exemplarity, leadership, and authority
If the influence of the exemplary tradition on Day and Maurin
has been well documented, less well understood is the relationship
between exemplarity and the operation of leadership and author-
ity within the Catholic Worker movement. In the third section
of this chapter, I will argue that the concept of exemplarity is in
many ways more useful than the Weberian concept of “charisma”
in capturing these aspects of the movement as well as explaining
the movement’s ability to sustain itself in the absence of Day, who
died in 1980. I hope to demonstrate that the Worker’s emphasis
on exemplarity created a functional model of leadership and au-
thority which, by eschewing domination and coercion in favour
of voluntary emulation, helped to reconcile these components of
the movement with anarchist principles.
Before exploring these claims, however, it must be admitted
that leadership and authority in the Catholic Worker movement
were not always exerted in a strictly exemplary fashion, partic-
ularly in the case of Day, whose influence was in a number of
important instances both direct and, arguably, authoritarian.
Day has, in fact, been described as something of a “benevolent
dictator.”^46 As Catholic Worker John Cort remembered: “I don’t
think I ever argued with her, so great was her authority among us.