Episode 89 | The Sources of Iran’s Revolutionary Ideology

By James Diddams & Jozef Andrew Kosc on June 10, 2025

Providence Managing Editor James Diddams is joined by Jozef Kosc, Hamilton Center Fellow at the University of Florida, to discuss the varied ideological parentage of Iran’s official state ideology, which includes not only Islamic sources but also European philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Georges Sorel, Vladimir Lenin, Ernst Cassirer, and GWF Hegel. Jozef’s two articles on this subject, “Iran’s Enduring Apocalyptic Political Mythology” and “Thousands of Paper Cuts, Then a Nuclear Bomb: Georges Sorel, French Anarchism, and Iran’s Revolutionary Warfighting Doctrine” appeared in Providence in September and October of 2024.

James Diddams is the Managing Editor of Providence: A Journal of Christianity & American Foreign Policy. His writing has been featured in Christianity Today, First Things, Providence, Mere Orthodoxy, Law & Liberty, The American Conservative and the Acton Institute’s Religion and Liberty Online. He graduated from Wheaton College (IL) and his website is jamesdiddams.org.

Jozef Andrew Kosc, KHS, PhD is a diplomatic historian, political scientist, and former senior national security analyst. He completed his DPhil (PhD) as a British Commonwealth Doctoral Scholar at the University of Oxford, where he authored a revisionist history of the Anglo-American Iraq War (2003-11), drawing on thousands of newly declassified sources.

Dr. Kosc currently serves as an America in the World Consortium Fellow at the Hamilton Center, University of Florida, and as a fellow at the Bill Graham Center for Contemporary International History at the University of Toronto. In 2019, Dr. Kosc was invested into the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, a chivalric order under the protection of the Holy See (the Vatican), in recognition of his support for the Christian presence in the Middle East. He is also a Contributing Editor with Providence.

Providence is the only publication devoted to Christian Realism in American foreign policy and is primarily funded by donors who generously help keep our magazine running. If you would care to make a donation it would be highly appreciated to help Providence in advancing the Christian realist perspective in 2025. Thank you!

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