influence, and imitation of the exemplar is voluntary rather than obligatory. The fact that the Catholic Worker used the idea of exemplarity 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 charisma, 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 routinization 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 abandon its principles in a frantic bid to institutionalize her authority. 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, however 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 centralization of a symbolic rather than an institutional kind. As McKanan notes, what is even more remarkable than the Worker’s avoidance
