Ronald L. Meek

Ronald L. Meek

Ronald Lindley ("Ron") 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.

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. 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.

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.

His first major work, Studies in the Labour Theory of Value, was published by Lawrence & Wishart in 1956. In the same year he 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 1963 he was appointed to the Tyler Chair 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.