There's also
Isaiah Berlin, described as both philosopher and historian because of his focus on the history of ideas.
His best known work is probably
Russian Thinkers, on the emergence of the 19th century Russian intelligentsia (the basis of Tom Stoppard's Coast of Utopia trilogy). This includes his most famous essay, The Hedgehog and the Fox, which takes off from Tolstoy's philosophy of history and delves into the oppostion of monistic (hedgehog, "single central vision ... universal, organising principle") vs pluralistic (fox) thinkers.
"The new history is like a deaf man replying to questions which nobody puts to him […] the primary question […] is, what power is it that moves the destinies of peoples? […] History seems to presuppose that this power can be taken for granted, and is familiar to everyone, but, in spite of every wish to admit that this power is familiar to us, anyone who has read a great many historical works cannot help doubting whether this power, which different historians understand in different ways, is in fact so completely familiar to everyone."
(Tolstoy, War and Peace, epilogue, part 2, chapter 1)
"Tolstoy was by nature not a visionary; he saw the manifold objects and situations on earth in their full multiplicity; he grasped their individual essences, and what divided them from what they were not, with a clarity to which there is no parallel. Any comforting theory which attempted to collect, relate, ‘synthesise’, reveal hidden substrata and concealed inner connections, which, though not apparent to the naked eye, nevertheless guaranteed the unity of all things, the fact that they were ‘ultimately’ parts one of another with no loose ends – the ideal of the seamless whole – all such doctrines he exploded contemptuously and without difficulty.
"His genius lay in the perception of specific properties, the almost inexpressible individual quality in virtue of which the given object is uniquely different from all others. Nevertheless he longed for a universal explanatory principle; that is, the perception of resemblances or common origins, or single purpose, or unity in the apparent variety of the mutually exclusive bits and pieces which composed the furniture of the world. Like all very penetrating, very imaginative, very clear-sighted analysts who dissect or pulverise in order to reach the indestructible core, and justify their own annihilating activities (from which they cannot abstain in any case) by the belief that such a core exists, he continued to kill his rivals’ rickety constructions with cold contempt, as being unworthy of intelligent men, always hoping that the desperately-sought-for ‘real’ unity would presently emerge from the destruction of the shams and frauds – the knock-kneed army of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century philosophies of history."
(Berlin, Hedgehog and the Fox)
Historicism or the Philosophy of History was a frequent subject of his as was the
Counter-Enlightenment and the
Romantics, and their evolution into nationalism.
For those looking for a more general approach to Berlin, a selection of his essays has been published as
The Proper Study Of Mankind.