Fyodor Dostoevsky, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Porfiry, the examining magistrate, puts the theory to Raskolnikov with deliberate crudeness — that ordinary people must live in obedience and have no right to overstep the law, while extraordinary people may commit all manner of crimes simply because they are extraordinary.1 Raskolnikov accepts the challenge but immediately objects to this caricature.
The theory, as he actually wrote it, is more precise and more disturbing. The right he speaks of is not an official right but a personal one — a permission a man gives his own conscience to step over certain obstacles, and then only when the fulfilment of his idea demands it.2 Newton, he argues, would have had not merely the right but the obligation to remove those who stood in the way of his discoveries becoming known to all humanity — but this emphatically does not mean Newton had the right to steal at the market whenever the mood took him.3
The right is bounded by the idea, not by the man's appetite. And the great legislators of history — Lycurgus, Solon, Muhammad, Napoleon — were all criminals by this measure, because every new law violates the ancient law held sacred by the fathers, and they did not flinch from bloodshed when bloodshed served the new order.4 What makes the theory genuinely original — and genuinely monstrous, as Razumikhin sees at once — is not the division of humanity into categories, which had been in the air for decades, from Carlyle's heroes to Pisarev's exaltation of Bazarov as a man above conscience.5
What is original is the permission to shed blood as a matter of conscience. Not legal permission, not official permission — but the interior sanction of a man who has decided his idea justifies the act.6 Razumikhin calls this more terrifying than any legal authorization, and he is right.7 The number of such extraordinary men is, Raskolnikov insists, vanishingly small — determined by some law of nature not yet known, a law that requires millions of ordinary human beings as base material before it produces one person with genuine independence of thought, and many thousands of millions before it produces a great genius.8
The masses exist, in his formulation, precisely to generate these rare individuals. They are the retort; the extraordinary man is what the retort finally yields. What the novel does with this theory is not refute it in argument — Porfiry never actually demolishes it — but rather set it walking in a human body and watch what happens. Raskolnikov believed he was Napoleon. He was not. And the gap between the theory and the man who holds it is where Crime and Punishment lives.
Ordinary people should live a life of obedience and do not have the right to overstep the law, because, you see, they are ordinary. But extraordinary people have the right to carry out all manner of crimes and to break the law as they please, all because they are extraordinary.Crime and Punishment, pp. 361–362
All I did was hint that an 'extraordinary' person has the right... not an official right, that is, but a personal one, to permit his conscience to step over... certain obstacles, but if and only if the fulfilment of his idea (one that may even bring salvation to all humanity) demands it.Crime and Punishment, pp. 362–364
Newton would have had the right and would even have been obliged... to remove these ten or one hundred people, so as to make his discoveries known to all humanity. In no way, however, does it follow from this that Newton had the right to kill whomsoever he wanted, whenever the mood took him, or to steal every day at the market.Crime and Punishment, pp. 362–364
take, for want of a better example, the legislators and founders of humanity, beginning with the most ancient and continuing with the Lycurguses, Solons, Muhammads, Napoleons and so on — they were criminals to a man, if for no other reason than that, by introducing a new law, they violated the ancient law held sacred by society and handed down from the fathers, and it goes without saying that they did not flinch from bloodshed.Crime and Punishment, pp. 362–364
Pisarev exalted him as a solitary figure who rises above the mass of humanity and the fetters of his own conscience: 'Neither above him, nor outside him, nor inside him does he recognize any regulator, any moral law, any principle.'Crime and Punishment, p. 732
what is truly original about it all — and truly belongs to you alone, to my horror — is that, in the end, you permit bloodshed as a matter of conscience.Crime and Punishment, pp. 367–368
the permission to shed blood as a matter of conscience, well... it's more terrifying, to my mind, than any official permission, any legal permission.Crime and Punishment, pp. 367–368
the number of people born with new ideas, with the ability to say something, anything, even the slightest bit new, is extraordinarily small, strangely so, in fact... The great mass of humanity, the base material, exists only for that reason — so that, in the end, by some special effort, via some hitherto mysterious process, through some intersection of blood and breed, it can make one last push and finally bring into the world that one person in, let's say, a thousand.Crime and Punishment, pp. 367–368