Shigalyovism is the social system of Shigalyov, the man with the long ears in the quintet, which starts from unlimited freedom and arrives at unlimited despotism: a tenth of humanity rules the other nine tenths, who become a herd.
Shigalyov reads the system at Virginsky's house, after saying that all the builders of systems, from Plato to Fourier, were dreamers and fools. He confesses that the system is unfinished, because its conclusion contradicts its starting point. The lame professor sums it up: to divide humanity into two unequal parts, one tenth with the freedom of the person and unlimited right over the other nine tenths, who lose their personality and, in unlimited obedience, attain a primitive innocence. Shigalyov answers the charge of villainy: he proposes not villainy but an earthly paradise, "and there can be no other on earth."
Shigalyov arrives at this conclusion against his will and suffers from it; Pyotr has no need of a conclusion. He praises the system as the work of a genius, sums it up in images of cruelty (Cicero's tongue cut out, Copernicus's eyes put out, Shakespeare stoned), and minutes later dismisses it as the work of a goldsmith. He keeps the part that serves to tear down and discards the part that would demand building. On the night of the crime, Shigalyov refuses the murder and leaves, because the crime contradicts his program, but he keeps the system.
Dostoevsky himself, in A Writer's Diary of 1876, protested against the idea that only a tenth of men should reach the highest development while the other nine serve as material and means.