is to claims about Day’s authoritarian streak, “her authoritarianism had little influence on the movement beyond New York.” In fact, “The one time she seriously tried to assert her authority on a national level”—the aforementioned effort to force other Worker communities to adopt a position of absolute pacifism or leave the movement— “the attempt backfired,” resulting in a rash of defections by and dissolutions of Worker communities and even the burning of the New York Catholic Worker.[56]
However dictatorial some of Day’s actions during her “long tenure as charismatic leader” may seem, Piehl is correct to argue that ultimately “the strength of Day’s leadership was exercised as much through her role as spiritual writer and exemplar as through her position as head of the movement.”[57] What I would like to suggest in evaluating that claim, however, is the utility of making a further distinction, a distinction between the concepts—both of which are invoked by Piehl—of “charisma” and “exemplarity.” Piehl is far from alone in attaching the ideas of charisma and charismatic leadership to Day and to the Worker more generally. Aside from one full-length study of this connection,[58] it is frequently invoked in the secondary literature: Day’s “charismatic leadership” has been described, for example, as “the glue of the movement,” at least during her lifetime.[59] Max Weber’s pioneering theory of charismatic leadership and authority—although it has been subjected to much critique and revision—remains the standard point of reference in this literature, and for this reason it is most useful to distinguish the concept of exemplarity from the concept of charisma as understood by Weber.[60]
There are at least three important respects in which Weber’s theory of charisma and the concept of exemplarity would seem to be in tension. Firstly, Weber’s understanding of charisma puts emphasis on the perception of special qualities in an exceptional individual. He describes charisma as “the surrender to the extraordinary. . .i.e., actual revelation or grace resting in such a person as a savior, a prophet, or a hero.”[61] Charismatic leaders are seen as “the bearers of specific gifts of body and mind” that are so unusual they are “considered ‘supernatural’ (in the sense that not everybody could have access to them).”[62] Charisma is thus bound up with the specific person who bears it—it is “a highly individual
