In a 1981 essay "Intention and explanation: A current controversy about the interpretation of National Socialism" from the book "The "Fuehrer State": Myth and Reality", Mason coined the terms Intentionist and Functionalist as terms for historical schools regarding Nazi Germany. Mason criticised Klaus Hildebrand and Karl Dietrich Bracher for focusing too much on Hitler as an explanation for the Holocaust. Mason wrote: In their recent essays Karl Dietrich Bracher and Klaus Hildebrand are largely concerned with the intentional actions of Hitler, which, they believe, followed with some degree of necessity from his political ideas. They formulate the question: why did the Third Reich launch a murderous war of genocide and destruction of human life on a hitherto unprecedented scale? They come in the end to the conclusion that the leaders of the Third Reich, above all Hitler, did this because they wanted to do it. This can be demonstrated by studying early manifestations of their "Weltanschauung", which are wholly compatible with the worst atrocities which actually occurred in the years 1938–1945. The goal of the Third Reich was genocidal war, and, in the end, that is what National Socialism was all about. From this it seems to follow that the regime is "unique", "totalitarian", "revolutionary", "utopian", devoted to an utterly novel principle for the public order, scientific racism. The leaders, in particular Hitler, demonstrably wanted all this, and it is thus, as Hildebrand recently suggested, wrong to talk of National Socialism; we should talk of Hitlerism.