Michael Perelman asked:  
 >> Samuelson ended his Nobel lecture citing Davenport: "There is no reason why  
 >> theoretical economics should be a monopoly of the reactionaries." Where did  
 >> Davenport write/say this?  
  
Warren Samuels replied:  
 >  
 > The quote is from his ECONOMICS OF ENTERPRISE, at or near the end.  
 >  
  
  
I believe that no such quote, in fact, exists. At the moment, there is   
no way for me to tell whether Samuelson actually said this. I am on the   
road and do not have access to the Samuelson lecture. I also do not know   
whether the Davenport citation was taken out of context. In any case,   
the text to which the quote appears to refer is at the end of   
Davenport's Preface to Economics of Enterprise. The last paragraph reads   
as follows:  
  
"It is, therefore, only upon the applications of economic science to the   
problems of practical progress that [I am to be] taken as a radical   
economist or as qualified to apply for membership among those thinkers   
who are facing toward a new day � the disturbers at large of the peace.   
Had it been within the reach of [my] power, this book should have set   
forth the economics of a new political and social program; as it is, the   
work expresses only an aspiration. Chief, however, among the monopolies   
that [I] would condemn is the monopoly, so far enjoyed by the   
reactionaries, of all authoritative economic doctrine."  
  
The Samuelson quote was presumably referring to the last sentence.  
  
Judging from the whole preface, Davenport was writing about some   
economists of his day, "the moderns," who sought to destroy what he   
regarded as the "old economics" of "the masters." This economics, he   
proclaimed, was flawed but not without merit. He wrote: "That our   
predecessors saw imperfectly was unavoidable; but that they did not see   
at all is incredible." He regarded "the moderns" as "reactionaries" and   
believed that they were wrong to think that they had all the right   
answers while their predecessors had none.  
  
I have not tried seriously to find out who Davenport was referring to.   
His main adversaries were (1) those who supported wholism, which is the   
antithesis of the entrepreneur point of view, and (2) those who   
justified the existing distribution of wealth by using marginal   
productivity theory.  
  
Pat Gunning