46 Essays in Anarchism and Religion: Volume 1
- For some insightful comments to this effect see Garry Wills’s
chapter on Day in Certain Trumpets: The Nature of Leadership
(New York: Touchstone, 1994). - Roberts, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, 83.
- In his autobiography, the Catholic Worker Ammon Hennacy re-
counts an interaction in which Day argued this point to a group of
skeptical anarchist interlocutors. Day, Hennacy writes, “felt that man
of his own free will accepted God or rejected God and if a man chose
to obey the authority of God and reject the authority of the state it
was not unethical to do so.” Autobiography of a Christian Anarchist
(New York: Catholic Worker Books, 1954), 129. - McKanan, The Catholic Worker after Dorothy, 22.
- McKanan, The Catholic Worker after Dorothy, 23.
- As McKanan writes, “Remarkably, no individual and no commu-
nity presumed to step into the leadership vacuum that had been left
by Dorothy Day. Yet perhaps it would be better to say that almost
everyone did so: because so many individuals and communities took
personal responsibility for some of the tasks needed to sustain a vital
movement, there was no need for a central leader or bureaucratic
structure to take charge of all of those tasks. In the last years of its
founder’s life, the Catholic Worker movement became what Dorothy
Day had always said it was: an organism rather than an organization.
And as such it has endured.” The Catholic Worker after Dorothy, 28. - Piehl, Breaking Bread, 243.
- On both the question of domination and the question of moral
authority, McLaughlin’s argument in his Anarchism and Authority:
A Philosophical Introduction to Classical Anarchism (Aldershot, UK:
Ashgate, 2007) is in tension with the idea of exemplary leadership
and authority I have developed here. McLaughlin insists upon un-
derstanding authority as a “dominative power,” entailing “the right
of A to issue directives and the correlative duty of B to follow them.”
(54) While McLaughlin recognizes that authority can exert a kind of
“normative” power, according to his definition it is always accompa-
nied by an act of submission and obedience, which is what gives it the
character of domination. Still, it is hard to make sense of his rather
blunt contention that anarchists “reject moral authority,” a conclusion