Shortly after his marriage, Tugan-Baranovsky began what would be a long running and esteemed academic career. His first scholarly article, "The Doctrine of the Marginal Utility of Economic Goods", saw print in October 1890 in the journal
Iuridicheskii Vestnik (Jurisprudence Courier). In this work, which presaged his later criticism of
Marxism, Tugan-Baranovsky argued that the
labor theory of value and contemporary
Marginalist economics were in basic agreement rather than in antagonistic opposition. After this first foray into theoretical economics, Tugan-Baranovsky turned his hand to the writing of biography, contributing short popular sketches of
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and
John Stuart Mill to a series entitled "Lives of Remarkable Men", produced by the publisher Pavlenkov. In these roughly 80-page books Tugan-Baranovsky was highly critical of Proudhon for his lack of internal consistency, stylistic obscurity, lack of imagination, and hypocritical support of the regime of
Louis Napoleon. He was much more sympathetic to Mill, hailing the economist as one who "more than anyone else helped the spread throughout the civilized world of a right understanding of the spirit of contemporary science, based on the study of nature." Following the intellectual example of
Karl Marx and
Frederick Engels, Tugan-Baranovsky envisaged an inevitable path for development modelled on England for guidance for nations such as Russia to follow. He next journeyed to London in the spring and summer of 1891 to work in the
British Museum, there examining the collection of rare books and statistical works. He then returned to Russia, spending two more years at work in St. Petersburg on a substantial tome of
business cycle theory,
Industrial Crises in Contemporary England: Their Causes and Influences on the Life of the People. In 1898 he published
The Russian Factory in the Nineteenth Century. This was the first volume of a planned more extensive work dealing with the impact of factory life on Russian society. According to his student and biographer
Nikolai Kondratiev, Tugan-Baranovsky retained this position until 1899, when he was dismissed for political unreliability. Nevertheless he announced that he was planning a second volume with material of a more theoretical nature in the preface to the 2nd edition published in 1900. Opinions vary as regards whether a draft manuscript of volume II was ever written. In 1917 Tugan published a book "Paper Currency and Metal", where he presented a theory of fiat paper currency, believing that a new stage in monetary history after the war was coming. He connected the value of fiat currency with the business cycle and with aggregate demand. He proposed active monetary policy, mainly through exchange rate control. In many respects he could be considered as a forerunner of the theory of endogenous money. ==Political activities==