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 had a strong influence on the Western academic discussion about Marx's economic theory. Life and career. 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 New Zealand journals like "Spike", "Salient" and "Tomorrow" were written under pseudonyms. 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. 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 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 Glasgow, Scotland, where he became university lecturer in the Department of Political Economy, and in 1949 he finished his doctoral thesis, "The development of the concept of surplus in economic thought from  Mun to Mill". He also remarried and learnt to play the piano. Meek was lecturer in Political Economy at the University of 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 had a big influence on the discussions of Marxian, Ricardian and Post-Keynesian economists in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1956 Meek also 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 the testimony of Eileen Appelbaum,