The Catholic Worker, Dorothy Day, and Exemplary Anarchism^37influence, and imitation of the exemplar is voluntary rather than
obligatory. The fact that the Catholic Worker used the idea of ex-
emplarity to undermine rather than reinforce differences between
leaders and led speaks to the fact that there was no general drive
for domination within the movement. Although Day may have
abused her authority at times, she also helped to ensure that the
Worker remained “a voluntary organization eschewing credo and
constitution.”^71 Day actively promoted the idea that authority of
all kinds—from exemplary authority to the authority of God^72 —
must be willingly acceded to by the individuals subject to it, and
she explicitly rejected—along with other Workers—the model of
command and obedience epitomized by the state.
Finally, while charisma is distinguished by its incessant tendency
to decay, exemplarity has a self-proliferating quality: exemplars,
as already noted, tend to give rise to new exemplars, while cha-
risma, bottled up in the exceptional few, is less communicable
and thus shorter-lived. This fact may help to explain the Catholic
Worker’s failure to follow the trajectory Weber prophesied for
charismatic movements that seek to overcome the mortality of
their leaders and the resultant loss of charisma through routiniza-
tion and bureaucratization. Even before Day’s death the Catholic
Worker’s particular brand of exemplarity, which urged Workers
to keep things “small” and to found autonomous communities in
response to new needs, made it unusually indisposed to the idea
of a large, bureaucratic organization. When Day’s health began
to decline in the 1970s, the movement did not suddenly aban-
don its principles in a frantic bid to institutionalize her author-
ity. This is not to suggest that Day’s role in the movement had
been insignificant in holding things together over the years: her
exemplarity did exert a kind of centripetal influence that helped
imbue the loosely-organized Worker communities with a sense of
common identity and the feeling that they were orbiting, how-
ever autonomously, around a common core. But there was no
suggestion that the only way for the movement to survive was
to become radically more centralized and rule-bound after her
death. Rather, the movement has continued to favour centraliza-
tion of a symbolic rather than an institutional kind. As McKanan
notes, what is even more remarkable than the Worker’s avoidance