Ronald L. Meek

Ronald Lindley ("Ron") Meek (? July 1917 – 18 August 1978) was a Marxian economist and social scientist known especially for his scholarly studies of classical political economy and the labour theory of value.

Meek was born in Wellington, New Zealand, where he attended school and entered Victoria University in the mid-1930s, initially to study law, and later economics. There he became interested in the thought of Karl Marx, theatre and local left-wing politics. Some of his articles of that period in journals like "Spike", "Salient" and "Tomorrow" were written under pseudonyms. In 1944 he married a communist activist, Rona Stephenson (better known as Rona Bailey) though they were soon divorced again. Meek revealed himself to be the brightest Marxian thinker of his generation in New Zealand; his first monograph, a pamphlet called "Maori Problems Today" (1943) discussed a topic which had been largely ignored by the Communist Party of New Zealand.

In 1946 Meek moved to Cambridge, England with a Strathcona studentship to read for a Phd under Piero Sraffa. Two years later, in October 1948, he moved to Glasgow, Scotland where he became university lecturer in the Department of Political Economy, and in 1949 he finished his Phd entitled "The development of the concept of surplus in economic thought from Mun to Mill". He also remarried. His first major work, "Studies in the Labour Theory of Value", was published by Lawrence & Wishart in 1956.

In 1963 he was appointed to the Tyler Chair of Economics at the University of Leicester, where he initiated a BSc course in Economics and a Public Sector Economics Research Centre. He published numerous books and articles on classical political economy, Marxian and Sraffian economics, as well as on electricity pricing and social theory.

Books by Ronald Meek

* "Studies in the Labor Theory of Value", 1956
* "The Economics of Physiocracy: Essays and Translations", 1962
* "Hill-walking in Arran", 1963
* "The rise and fall of the concept of the economic machine", 1965
* "Economics and Ideology and Other Essays", 1967
* "Marx and Engels on the population bomb" (selections from the writings of Marx and Engels dealing with the theories of Thomas Robert Malthus. Edited by Ronald L. Meek. Translations from the German by Dorothea L. Meek and Ronald L. Meek), 1971
* "Figuring out society", 1971
* "Quesnay's Tableau Economique", 1972 (with Margaret Kuczynski)
* "Turgot on Progress, Sociology and Economics", 1973
* "Precursors of Adam Smith", 1973
* "Social Science and the Ignoble Savage", 1976
* "Smith, Marx and After: Ten Essays in the Development of Economic Thought", 1977.
* "Adam Smith: Lectures in Jurisprudence", 1978 (edited with D.D. Raphael & R.P. Stein)

elected Articles by Ronald Meek

* "The Rehabilitation of Ricardo", "The Listener", 4 Oct 1951
* "New Light on the Labour Theory of Value", "The Listener", 7 Aug 1952
* The Scottish Contribution to Marxist Sociology", 1954, in Saville, editor, "Democracy and the Labour Movement"
* "Adam Smith and the Classical Concept of Profits", 195?, "Scottish Journal of Political Economy"
* "The Decline of Ricardian Economics in England", 1950, "Economica"
* "Stalin as an Economist", 1953, "RES"
* "Smith, Turgot and the Four Stages Theory", 1971, "History of Political Economy" 1971
* "Marxism and Marginalism", "History of Political Economy" 1972
* "The Falling Rate of Profit", 1976, in Howard and King, editor, "Economics of Marx"

Commentaries on Ronald Meek

* Ian Bradley and Michael Howard, eds., Classical and Marxian Political Economy. Essays in honour of Ronald Meek. London: Macmillan, 1982. (contains a bibliography of Meek's scholarly articles).
* Michael C. Howard and John E. King, “Ronald Meek”, in: "History of Political Economy", Volume 35, Number 3, Fall 2003.
* Howard, M.C. & King, J.E. (2001). "Ronald Meek and the rehabilitation of surplus economics", in S.G. Medema & W.J. Samuels (eds), "Historians of Economics and Economic Thought", London: Routledge, 185-213.