Übermensch / Extraordinary man
The idea that a small class of people — variously called the Übermensch, the great man, or the extraordinary man — stand outside ordinary moral rules and are entitled (or compelled) to transgress them in pursuit of some higher vision. The concept has a long lineage: it draws on Homeric notions of heroic greatness, surfaces in Hegel's "world-historical individuals" who advance the unfolding of Spirit, and reaches its most famous form in Nietzsche's Übermensch in Thus Spake Zarathustra — the human type that overcomes Christian "slave morality" and creates its own values after the death of God. Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov gives the idea a darker, parodic form in Crime and Punishment: he divides humanity into "ordinary" and "extraordinary" people and convinces himself, briefly, that he is one of the latter and so justified in murder.