Timothy Wright Mason (2 March 1940 – 5 March 1990) was an English Marxist historian of Nazi Germany. He was one of the founders of the History Workshop Journal and specialised in the social history of the Third Reich. He argued for the "primacy of politics," i.e., that the Nazi government was "increasingly independent of the influence of the [German] economic ruling classes," and believed the Second World War had been triggered by an economic crisis inside Germany. Early life Born in Birkenhead on 2 March 1940, the child of schoolteachers, he was educated at and the University of Oxford. He taught at Oxford from 1971 to 1984 and was twice married. He helped to found the left-wing journal History Workshop Journal. Mason specialised in the social history of the Third Reich, especially that of the working class, and his most famous books were his 1975 work Arbeiterklasse und Volksgemeinschaft (The Working Class and the National Community), a study of working-class life under the Nazis, and his 1977 book, Sozialpolitik im Dritten Reich (Social Policy in the Third Reich). Unusually for a British historian, most of his books were originally published in German. Role of historians Mason saw his role as developing history that was flexible, humane and analytical. Mason wrote about historians' role in 1986: "If historians do have a public responsibility, if hating is part of their method and warning part of their task, it is necessary that they should hate precisely". Mason's interests as a Marxist historian were in writing a history that was not deterministic and in revising views on fascism. As part of his efforts to develop a broader picture of the Third Reich, Mason approached such topics as women in Nazi Germany, a critique of "intentionalist" views of the Third Reich and theories of generic fascism as an analytical tool. In Social Policy in the Third Reich, Mason, unlike his counterparts in East Germany, did not confine his research mostly to resistance movements within the German working class, but sought a comprehensive picture of the life of the working class and how it was viewed both by itself and by the Nazi regime. Mason argued that the Nazi leadership was haunted by memories of the November Revolution of 1918 and so the dictatorship was prepared to make no small material allowances in the form of social policy, its reluctance to impose material shortages, and