# Ronald L. Meek

Ronald Lindley Meek (27 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. During the 1960s and 1970s, his writings were influential in the Western academic discussion about Marx's economic theory.

## Life and career

Ron 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 commerce. There he became interested in the thought of Karl Marx, theatre and local left-wing politics. Many of his articles of that period in New Zealand journals like Spike, Salient and Tomorrow were written under pseudonyms. The articles included critical commentary on New Zealand history and politics as well as overseas politics. In 1939, he graduated with a Masters in Law, and was awarded a fellowship to Cambridge University. However, World War II intervened and his graduate studies at Cambridge were delayed for six years.
Ron Meek was a founder of the People's Theatre in Hamilton, where he met his first wife Rona Stephenson (better known as Rona Bailey) who was a fellow communist. They were married in Hamilton, on 22 December 1942. They divorced in December 1944, and on 15 June 1945 Rona remarried to the communist trade-unionist Reginald John ("Chip") Bailey who was active in the Unity Theatre in Wellington.
Meek's first published title, a pamphlet called Maori Problems Today (1942), discussed a topic which had previously been largely ignored by the Communist Party of New Zealand. His 1946 lecture to the Wellington Branch of the New Zealand Geographical Society on Maori emancipation was published in the New Zealand Geographer.
In 1946 Meek moved to Cambridge, England, with a Strathcona studentship to read for a Ph.D. under Piero Sraffa and Maurice Dobb. Two years later, in October 1948, he moved to the University of Glasgow in Scotland, where he became university lecturer in the Department of Political Economy. In 1949, he completed his Cambridge doctoral thesis on the development of the concept of surplus in economic thought from Thomas Mun to John Stuart Mill. He also remarried and learnt to play the piano. Meek was lecturer in Political Economy at Glasgow until 1959, and Senior Lecturer from 1960 to 1963.
His first major work, Studies in the Labour Theory of Value, was published by Lawrence & Wishart in 1956 (a second edition was published by Monthly Review Press in 1973). The book was widely read and influenced the discussion of Marxian, Ricardian and post-Keynesian economics in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1956 Meek quit the Communist Party of Great Britain and he abandoned his previous support for the policies of Joseph Stalin, although he continued to be a Marxist until his last years. He was acknowledged to be a scholarly authority on Adam Smith and on the Physiocrats. In the introduction to an article from 1971, "Smith, Turgot and the 'Four Stages' Theory," Ron Meek writes: "In the good old days, when I was a fierce young Marxist instead of a benign middle-aged Meeksist, I became very interested in the work of the members of the so-called Scottish historical school..."
From 1963 until his death he was Tyler Professor of Economics at the University of Leicester, where he initiated a B.Sc. 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.
According to Eileen Appelbaum,
   "At the time of his death, Meek was engaged in a reexamination of theories of relative price and income distribution in terms of the changing attitudes of economists toward the concept of surplus. In particular, he wanted to compare the uses to which Marx and Sraffa each put this concept, and to comment from this perspective on contemporary controversies between Marxists and 'neo-Ricardians.'"

## Works
### Books

* Maori Problems Today: A Short Survey, Wellington: Progressive Publishing Society, 1942
* (ed., trans. with Dorothea L. Meek) Marx and Engels on Malthus: Selections from the Writings of Marx and Engels Dealing with the Theories of Thomas Robert Malthus, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1953; revised edition: Marx and Engels on the Population Bomb: Selections from the Writings of Marx and Engels Dealing with the Theories of Thomas Robert Malthus, Berkeley, CA: The Ramparts Press, 1971
* Studies in the Labour Theory of Value, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1956; revised edition 1973
* The Economics of Physiocracy: Essays and Translations, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962
* Hill-walking in Arran: Routes Up the Main Hills and Ridges in the North of the Isle of Arran, Edinburgh: W.R. Chambers, 1963
* The Rise and Fall of the Concept of the Economic Machine, Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1965
* Economics and Ideology and Other Essays: Studies in the Development of Economic Thought, London: Chapman & Hall, 1967
* Figuring Out Society: An Introduction to the Use of Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences, London: Fontana, 1971
* (ed. with Marguerite Kuczynski) François Quesnay, Quesnay's "Tableau Economique", London: Macmillan, 1972
* (ed.) Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Turgot on Progress, Sociology and Economics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973
* (ed.) Precursors of Adam Smith, London: Dent, 1973
* Social Science and the Ignoble Savage, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976
* Smith, Marx and After: Ten Essays in the Development of Economic Thought, London: Chapman and Hall, 1977
* (ed., with D. D. Raphael and Peter Stein) Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978; reprinted at Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982
* (with Ian G. Bradley) Matrices and Society: Matrix Algebra and Its Applications in the Social Sciences, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986; reprinted at Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987.

### Selected articles

* "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", in John Saville (ed.), Democracy and the Labour Movement, 1954
* "Adam Smith and the Classical Concept of Profits", Scottish Journal of Political Economy, June 1954
* "The Decline of Ricardian Economics in England", Economica, 1950
* "Stalin as an Economist", The Review of Economic Studies, volume 21, issue 3, 1953, pp. 232–239
* "Rates of Growth" (book review of W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth; Maurice Dobb, An Essay on Economic Growth and Planning; and Isaac Deutscher, The Great Contest), New Left Review, series I no. 6, November–December 1960
* "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", in M.C. Howard and J.E. King (eds.), Economics of Marx, 1976