Economist
Born 27 July 1917, Wellington, New Zealand.
Died 18 August 1978.

A noted political economist who co-edited the internationally acclaimed Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith in 7 volumes.

Connection to the University of Glasgow: Lecturer

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Achievements

The following achievement is associated with Ronald Meek:

Extending and renewing interest in Adam Smith (1723-1790)
A work of great skill and dedication taking over 25 years to complete, the seven volumes of The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith were published by Oxford University Press between 1976 and 1987.

Biography

Ronald Lindley Meek was a lecturer in the Department of Political Economy from 1948 to 1963.

Born and educated in Wellington, New Zealand, he became interested in Marxist politics while at Victoria University and was widely seen in his homeland as the brightest Marxist thinker of his generation.

He moved to Cambridge in 1946 to undertake a PhD entitled The development of the concept of surplus in economic thought from Mun to Mill. This was completed in 1949, a year after he came to Glasgow to join Alec Macfie's Department of Political Economy. His first major work, Studies in the Labour Theory of Value, was published by Lawrence & Wishart in 1956.

In 1963 he was appointed to the Tyler Chair of Economics at the University of Leicester, where he initiated a BSc 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.

He is widely remembered as an authority on Adam Smith, having been closely involved in the Glasgow Edition of the Works of Adam Smith.