Eero Arum

Biography

Eero Arum will join the Center for Humanities as Assistant Professor of Humanities in August 2027. He works on ancient, late medieval, and early modern political philosophy. His research examines the conceptual history of sovereignty, political Hebraism, and political theology. He has published on authors such as Aristotle, Niccolò Machiavelli, Jean Bodin, and Thomas Hobbes in the American Political Science Review, Political Theory, History of Political Thought, The Review of Politics, and the forthcoming Cambridge History of Democracy.

During the 2024–2025 academic year, Arum held a Dissertation Grant from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) at Ruhr-Universität Bochumm where he conducted archival research on Carl Schmitt’s reception of Bodin. In the 2026–2027 academic year, he will be a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Political Theory at Princeton’s University Center for Human Values.

Arum holds a B.A. in Political Science and Philosophy from the University of Chicago (2018) and a Ph.D. in Political Science (Political Theory and Philosophy) from the University of California, Berkeley (2026).

Current Projects

Arum’s current book project, Political Metaphysics: Popular Sovereignty and Political Form, 1251–1651, examines why appeals to the sovereignty of “the people” so often culminate in the concentration of authority in a single office. It reconstructs an overlooked intellectual tradition, extending from high Scholastic political philosophy to early modern state theory, in which the doctrine of popular sovereignty was designed to legitimize—and even require—unified executive authority. At the center of this tradition is a hylomorphic conception of the body politic, on which the multitudois the “matter” of the state and the princeps is the form that gives unity to its will.

Publications

Arum, Eero and Hoekstra, Kinch, “Absolute Democracy: Bodin and Hobbes,” in The Cambridge History of Democracy, vol. 2, ed. Sophie Smith and Markku Peltonen (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

Arum, Eero and Tessarolo, Gio Maria, “Jean Bodin’s Demonic Constitutionalism: Sovereignty, Natural Law, and Political Theology,” American Political Science Review 120.2 (2026): 490–503.

Arum, Eero, “Machiavelli Against Sovereignty: Emergency Powers and the Decemvirate,” Political Theory 52.5 (2024): 697–725.

Arum, Eero, “Aristotle on Political Friendship and Equality,” History of Political Thought 44.4 (2023): 655–675.

Arum, Eero, “Machiavelli’s Principio: Political Renewal and Innovation in the Discourses on Livy,” The Review of Politics 82.4 (2020): 525–547.