New Left Review I/46, November-December 1967

B.B.

‘Economics and Ideology and Other Essays’

Ronald L. Meek: Economics and Ideology and Other Essays: studies in the development of economic thought. Chapman and Hall, 40s.

Professor Meek’s new book is a collection of essays produced between 1950 and 1962, largely rewritten to make a coherent whole around the theme of the title essay and ‘to bring the views expressed in line with those the author holds today’. The central theme dominates throughout. Meek attacks those like Cannan and Jevons who saw the essential break in the history of economic thought in the 1870’s with the introduction of marginal analysis, those like Keynes who lump all economists from Smith to Pigou under the rubric ‘Classical’ as they were all more or less explicit exponents of Say’s Law, and those, like Schumpeter, who although they agree with Meek (and with Marx) in seeing the decisive turning point in 1830, regard the period from Smith to Ricardo (Marx’s Classical Period) as a historical aberration from advancing General Equilibrium Theory in search of the metaphysical chimera ‘value’. Meek insists on the existence of an essential difference between pre-1830 and post-1830 economics in that ‘the Classical economists, speaking very broadly, believed that if the phenomena of the market place were to be properly understood, the investigator must begin by penetrating below the surface of those phenomena to the relations between men in their capacity as producers, which in the last analysis could be said to determine their market relations . . . PostRicardian economists, quick to appreciate in the decade following Ricardo’s death that it was becoming dangerous to start with the socio-economic relations between men as producers, began to argue that it was permissible— and indeed necessary in the interests of scientific objectivity—to abstract from these relationships’ (pp. 181–2). For Meek, as for Marx, the General Equilibrium approach is the more ideological and the less scientific.

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