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.
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".
In 1956 Meek also 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.
In the introduction to an article from 1971, "Smith, Turgot and the 'Four Stages' Theory," Ron Meek writes: "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..."[6] From 1963 until his death he was Tyler Professor of Economics at the University of Leicester, where he initiated a B.Sc.
According to the testimony of Eileen Appelbaum,[7] "At the time of his death, Meek was engaged in a reexamination of theories of relative price and income distribution in terms of the changing attitudes of economists toward the concept of surplus.