conclusion that the Catholic Worker’s Catholicism has—at least in some respects—enriched rather than undermined its anarchism, it also suggests that scholars of anarchism would do well to look more carefully at the potential for exemplarity to influence organizational structure and to serve as a binding agent within anarchist movements and communities. Exemplarity may help to separate authority from domination and to explain how the phenomenon that Paul McLaughlin labels “moral authority” may indeed be reconcilable with anarchist principles.[77]
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have attempted to use the concept of exemplarity to account for the affinity the Catholic Worker movement found between Catholicism’s traditional celebration of saintly exempla and anarchism, the political philosophy that best describes the approach to organization the movement adopted internally, and promoted externally, through its social activism. More specifically, I have endeavoured to dissipate some of the “bewilderment” that many scholars have experienced in trying to make sense of Dorothy Day’s “successful use of authority,” by arguing that on the level of the movement as a whole she adopted an exemplary model of leadership that was ultimately more decisive than her occasionally authoritarian impulses.[78] This is not because I wish to exonerate Day of her shortcomings—indeed, I believe that she is open to criticism not only for overstepping her bounds with respect to the direct influence she exerted on the movement, but also for the example she set. In some ways, her exemplary authority, quite aside from whatever direct power she possessed, also served to close down possibilities within the movement that might otherwise have emerged.[79] Regardless of the manner in which Day wielded the exemplary leadership I have attributed to her, however, examining her relationship to the broader movement—in which, as Nancy Roberts writes, “Day’s authority was most reinforced by the power of her own pristine example”[80]—can help us to discern the concept of exemplarity in action and to weigh its merits. That Day should go down as the “inventor” of Catholic radicalism in the United States is instructive, for it teaches us one
