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Introduction In addition to his economic analysis, a key component of Keynes's intellectual legacy is his methodology, derived from the fusion of social philosophy and vision with politics, public policy concerns and economic analysis, which he employed to offer a solution to the most fundamental and pressing problems of his time. In effect, such a methodology constitutes, in spite of Keynes's opposition to classical economics, a rediscovery, and adaptation of the one used by the classical school of political economy, which had been abandoned as a consequence of the onslaught of the “neo‐classical” revolution in the late 1800s with its strict focus on “scientific” or positive economics.

Insufficient achievement of performance management in the federal government is widely acknowledged, despite the absence of an accepted way for determining when and how progress has been made. The process of maturation is traced through a model based on Stinchcombe’s innovation framework, enabling progress toward utilization of performance management to be gauged. The premise of this model is that change has to permeate the organization, reaching the level of routines, to be implemented operationally. Assessment of performance management maturity employs a match between the obstacles expected in the distinct stages of adoption and implementation and the hindrances federal agencies have encountered. Quantitative analysis of data provided by pooled Government Accountability Office surveys of federal managers points to activity at the adoption stage, but not at the implementation stage, calling into question the maturity of the performance initiative.

Austrian economist Ludwig Mises’s central role in the socialist calculation debates has been consensually acknowledged since the early 1920s. Yet, only recently Nemeth, O’Neill, Uebel, and others have drawn particular attention to Mises’s encounter with logical empiricist Otto Neurath. Despite several surprising agreements, Neurath and Mises certainly provide different answers to the questions “what is meant by rational economic theory” (Neurath) and whether “socialism is the abolition of rational economy” (Mises). Previous accounts and evaluations of the exchange between Neurath and Mises suffer from attaching little regard to their idiosyncratic uses of the term “rational.” The paper at hand reconstructs and critically compares the different conceptions of rationality defended by Neurath and Mises. The author presents two different resolutions to a detected tension in Mises’s deliberations on rationality: the first is implicit in Neurath’s, O’Neill’s, and Salerno’s reading of Mises and faces several interpretational problems; the author proposes a divergent interpretation. Based on the reconstructions of Neurath’s and Mises’s conceptions of rationality, the author suggests some implications with respect to Viennese Late Enlightenment and the socialist calculation debates.