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.
What still makes Meek's texts interesting today, is that he paid close attention to primary sources and to the history of political economy, pioneered new interpretations, and studied (in the late 1940s and 1950s) with some of the top scholars in the field, including Maurice Dobb and Piero Sraffa.This is acknowledged by professor Anwar Shaikh in his treatise on classical economics (Capitalism - competition, conflict, crises. Oxford University Press, 2016). In addition, Meek analyzed the attitudes of philosophers and political economists in the colonial epoch towards indigenous peoples, long before this became a recognized academic pursuit.Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.
Life and career Ron Meek was born in 1917, 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. After the worst years of the Great Depression, the First Labour Government of New Zealand had been elected in 1935, and there was a lot of interest in politics.
Many of Meek's articles of that period, in New Zealand journals like The Spike,See e.g. “Stalin worship: is it a communist cult?”, “Auden in the Theatre”, “Apocalypse”. In: The Spike, or Victoria College Review, 1941, pp. 13-16 etc. Salient and Tomorrow, were written under pseudonyms. This was not a matter of cowardice, but a necessity, as New Zealand had very harsh sedition and censorship laws at that time.Graeme Dunstall, “Governments, the police and the Left, 1912-1951”, in: Pat Moloney and Kerry Taylor (eds.), On the Left: Essays on socialism in New Zealand. Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2002, pp. 87-101, at p. 96. Meek's articles included critical commentary on New Zealand history and politics as well as covering overseas politics.R. Barrowman, Creative Victoria: a history of 119 years of creativity at Victoria University of Wellington. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2018. As a keen participant in student drama clubs, he wrote quite a few plays, skits, poems and songs, often with parodic styles, whacky humour and satirical themes. He was also involved many times in organizing student festivities.
In 1939, he graduated with a Masters in Law, and was awarded a fellowship for study at Cambridge University in England. 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.Peter Franks, "Bailey, Rona 1914-2005", in: Dictionary of New Zealand Biography online.
Meek's first published monograph, a pamphlet called Maori Problems Today (1942), discussed a topic which had previously received little attention from the Communist Party of New Zealand.“Between 1921 and 1952 the CPNZ’s efforts to engage with Maori workers – and more broadly, issues relating to Maori – were somewhat sporadic” – Kerry Taylor, “'Potential allies of the working class': The Communist Party of New Zealand and Maori, 1921-1952.” Chapter 6 in Pat Moloney and Kerry Taylor (eds.), On the Left: Essays on socialism in New Zealand. Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2002, pp. 103-115, at p. 104. His 1946 lecture to the Wellington Branch of the New Zealand Geographical Society on Maori emancipation was published in the New Zealand Geographer.Ronald L. Meek, "Some features of New Zealand's racial problem". New Zealand Geographer, Vol. 3 No. 1, April 1947. Meek's 1976 book Social Science and the Ignoble Savage was partly inspired by his New Zealand experience.
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 and learnt to play the pianoIan Bradley and Michael Howard (eds.), Classical and Marxian Political Economy. Essays in honour of Ronald L. Meek. London: Macmilllan Press, 1982, p. vii. (another leisure pursuit was hill-walking on the Isle of Arran in the Firth of Clyde).Ronald L. Meek, Hill-walking in Arran: Routes Up the Main Hills and Ridges in the North of the Isle of Arran. Edinburgh: W.R. Chambers, 1963).
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 remarried in Glasgow on 20 October 1951, to the 25 year-old Slavist, writer and editor Dorothea Luise Schulz, of German origin.Deutsche biographie; . The couple had two children, Roger Duncan (b. 10 July 1958) and Alison Fiona (b. 31 October 1959).Descendants of Saul Katzenellenbogen
His first major work, Studies in the Labour Theory of Value, was published by Lawrence & Wishart in 1956Henry Douglas Dickinson, “Review of Studies in the Labour Theory of Value by Ronald L. Meek” , in: The Economic Journal, Vol. 67, No. 267, September 1957), pp. 499-504. (a second, revised edition was later published by Monthly Review Press, in 1973). The main aim of the book was "to build some sort of bridge between Marxian economists and their non-Marxian colleagues so that the latter can at least be made to see what the former are trying to get at".Ibid., p. 499. Meek's work was widely read“…his many books and articles … made his name very familiar to fellow scholars all over the world.” - Ian Bradley and Michael Howard (eds.), Classical and Marxian Political Economy. Essays in honour of Ronald L. Meek. London: Macmilllan Press, 1982, p. v-vi. 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 wrote: "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..."Meek, Ronald L. “Smith, Turgot, and the ‘Four Stages’ Theory.” History of Political Economy 3, no. 1 (1971): 9.
Meek was lecturer in Political Economy at Glasgow until 1959, and Senior Lecturer from 1960 to 1963. Graduates “placed him top of their list of lecturers in economics”.Ian Bradley and Michael Howard (eds.), Classical and Marxian Political Economy. Essays in honour of Ronald L. Meek. London: Macmilllan Press, 1982, p. v. From 1963 until his untimely death in 1978 (when he was 61), 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.Ibid., p. vi. His intellectual legacy includes numerous books and articles on classical political economy, Marxian and Sraffian economics, as well as on electricity pricing and social theory.For Meek's scholarly publications on economic theory, see: "A bibliography of Ronald L. Meek", in: Ian Bradley and Michael Howard (eds.), Classical and Marxian Political Economy. Essays in honour of Ronald L. Meek. London: Macmilllan Press, 1982, pp. xi-xiv. Meek also published in magazines and in the press.
According to Eileen Appelbaum,Eileen Appelbaum, "Ronald L. Meek, July 27, 1917-August 18, 1978." In: Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, Vol. 1, No. 3, Spring, 1979, pp. 123-125, at p. 125. towards the end of his life Meek wanted to revisit a theoretical issue which he had investigated in his Phd thesis two decades earlier:
In an essay first presented in 1975, Meek indicated in outline his position on the new theoretical conflict which was brewing between New Left Marxists and heterodox neo-Ricardians, about the Marxian transformation problem and Piero Sraffa's contributions.Ronald L. Meek, "Whatever happened to the labour theory of value?", in: M.J. Artis & A.R. Nobay (eds.), Essays in economic analysis: the proceedings of the Association of University Teachers of Economics, Sheffield 1975. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976, pp. 245-259. A reworked version of this article was published under the title "From values to prices: was Marx's journey really necessary?" in: Ronald L. Meek, Smith, Marx & After. Ten essays in the development of econmic thought. London: Chapman & Hall, 1977, pp. 120-133. Marxian scholars of Meek's generation had generally regarded Sraffa as a friend of Marx, of the Left and of socialism; in the cold war era, Sraffa had done much to restore the scientific credibility of classical political economy. However, the younger generation of Marxist academics was often much more critical of Sraffa's economics. Sraffa's abandonment of Marx's theory of value, and his silence about the issue of the exploitation of labour power, seemed to be incompatible with Marx's analysis in Das Kapital. For their part, the neo-Ricardians usually regarded Marxist economic orthodoxy as unscientific and incoherent. Thus, the cohabitation of Marxism and Ricardianism, which Meek had experienced as a British academic during the 1950s and 1960s, gave way to opposed camps of "orthodox" Marxists and "heterodox" neo-Ricardian economists in the 1970s and 1980s.
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