Ronald L. Meek

Ronald Lindley Meek (born July 27, 1917 in Wellington , New Zealand ; † August 18, 1978 ) was a Marxist- influenced political economist and sociologist, who is particularly known for his studies of classical political economy and labor theory .

Meek was born in Wellington, where he attended school and from the mid-1930s studied law and then economics at Victoria University of Wellington . At this time he began to develop an interest in the theories of Karl Marx and left politics. His first major pamphlet, from 1943, was devoted to Maori Problems Today , neglected by the New Zealand Communist Party. In 1946 Meek went to Cambridge , England, where he began his doctoral studies under Piero Sraffa and Maurice Dobb . In 1948 he went to Glasgow , Scotland, where he was lecturer in political economy at the university and completed his doctorate in 1949 ( The development of the concept of surplus in economic thought from Mun to Mill ). His first major work, Studies in the Labor Theory of Value , was published in 1956. In the same year he left the British Communist Party due to the controversy surrounding Stalinism . In 1963 he went to the University of Leicester . Meek has published numerous books and articles on classical political economy , Marxist economic theory, and Sraffa's economic theory , as well as in other subject areas.

Works

• Studies in the Labor Theory of Value , 1956
• The Economics of Physiocracy: Essays and Translations , 1962
• Hill walking in Arran , 1963
• The rise and fall of the concept of the economic machine , 1965
• Economics and Ideology and Other Essays , 1967
• Marx and Engels on the population bomb (selection of writings by Marx and Engels on Malthus. Ed. Ronald L. Meek. Translation by Dorothea L. Meek and Ronald L. Meek), 1971
• Figuring out society , 1971
• Quesnay's Tableau Economique , 1972 (with Marguerite Kuczynski )
• Turgot on Progress, Sociology and Economics , 1973
• Precursors of Adam Smith , 1973
• Social Science and the Ignoble Savage , 1976
• Smith, Marx and After: Ten Essays in the Development of Economic Thought , 1977.
• Adam Smith: Lectures in Jurisprudence , 1978 (Ed. With DD Raphael & RP Stein)
• Matrices and society (with Ian Bradley). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987.

Selected items

• "The Rehabilitation of Ricardo", The Listener , Oct 4, 1951
• "New Light on the Labor Theory of Value," The Listener , Aug 7, 1952
• The Scottish Contribution to Marxist Sociology, 1954, in Saville, editor, Democracy and the Labor Movement
• "Adam Smith and the Classical Concept of Profits," June 1954, Scottish Journal of Political Economy
• "The Decline of Ricardian Economics in England", 1950, Economica
• "Stalin as an Economist", 1953, RES
• "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," 1976, in Howard and King, editor, Economics of Marx