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,
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. Meek's articles included critical commentary on New Zealand history and politics as well as covering overseas politics. 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. 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. His 1946 lecture to the Wellington Branch of the
New Zealand Geographical Society on Maori emancipation was published in the
New Zealand Geographer. 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 piano (another leisure pursuit was hill-walking on the
Isle of Arran in the
Firth of Clyde). 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. The couple had two children, Roger Duncan (b. 10 July 1958) and Alison Fiona (b. 31 October 1959). His first major work,
Studies in the Labour Theory of Value, was published by
Lawrence & Wishart in 1956 (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". Meek's work 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 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 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”. 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. 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. According to
Eileen Appelbaum, 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. 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 ==