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 understanding of the relationship of the Catholic Worker to the anarchist 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 examples 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 compromising 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 anarchist 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, paradeigma 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
