Also known as extraordinary men, extraordinary man, Napoleon.
The idea that some people stand outside ordinary moral law and may step over blood if their purpose is large enough. At first it is only the shape of Raskolnikov's private arrogance and fever. It gives intellectual dress to a question the novel makes bodily, social, and spiritual.
Part III, Chapter V
Porfiry names Raskolnikov's published article and asks whether extraordinary men have a right to crime.
Part V, Chapter IV
In confessing to Sonia, Raskolnikov returns to Napoleon and admits how the theory was tangled with vanity, poverty, and self-testing.
Epilogue
The epilogue shows the theory not as an argument defeated in debate but as a sickness from which Raskolnikov begins to recover through love and suffering.
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