Tuhan-Baranovsky, Mykhailo

Tuhan-Baranovsky, Mykhailo [Туган-Барановський, Михайло; Tuhan-Baranovs’kyj, Myxajlo], b 20 January 1865 in Solone, Kharkiv gubernia, d 21 January 1919 near Odesa. Economist, sociologist, and theoretician of the co-operative movement; full member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. After graduating from Kharkiv University (1888) he received higher degrees from Moscow University (PH D, 1898) and lectured at Saint Petersburg University. In his first published article (1890) he presented a synthesis of the labor and the marginal utility theories of value. His MA dissertation on industrial cycles in Britain (1894) proposed a disproportionality theory of business cycles and anticipated later discoveries of the multiplier effect. Although in the 1890s he was a proponent of legal Marxism, he rejected Karl Marx’s theories of the business cycle, the inevitable breakdown of capitalism, and class struggle. Under the influence of neo-Kantian ideas he turned his attention to co-operation as a vehicle of social justice and published a survey of the history of political economy (1901–2), a textbook of political economy (1907; Ukrainian translation 1919), a study of the theoretical foundations of Marxism (1905), a comparative study of contemporary socioeconomic ideals (1913), a theoretical analysis of the social foundations of co-operation (1916; abr Ukrainian version 1919), and an outline of the co-operative ideal (1918). His Bumazhnye den'gi i metall (Paper Money and Metal, 1917) demonstrated the limits of the quantity theory of money and anticipated J. Keynes's ideas on monetary policy. After returning to Ukraine in 1917, Tuhan-Baranovsky joined the Ukrainian Party of Socialists-Federalists and served as general secretary of finance in the government of the Ukrainian National Republic (September–December 1917). He helped found the Ukrainian Society of Economists, the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, and the Ukrainian State University of Kyiv (see Kyiv University) and served as chairman of the academy's socioeconomic department, dean of the university's faculty of law and social sciences, and editor of the journal Ukraïns’ka kooperatsiia. He died on his way to Paris, where he was to have represented the UNR at the Paris Peace Conference. Published in English translation have been his works Modern Socialism in Its Historical Development (1910, 1966) and The Russian Factory in the 19th Century (1970).

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kondrat’iev, N. Mikhail Ivanovich Tugan-Baranovskii (Petrograd 1923)
Kowal, Lubomyr. ‘Economic Doctrines of M.I. Tugan-Baranovsky,’ PH D diss, University of Illinois, 1965

Lubomyr Kowal

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]