Josh Hammer
Duke University BA; University of Chicago Law School JD; editor at Newsweek; Edmund Burke Foundation research fellow; early NatCon enthusiast; author of “Common Good Originalism” and related constitutional theory; perhaps the most prolific popularizer of common-good constitutional thinking after Vermeule
Who He Is
Josh Hammer is a conservative lawyer and journalist who has served as editor at Newsweek and as a research fellow with the Edmund Burke Foundation (the organization behind the National Conservatism conferences). He is one of the most industrious writers in the New Right ecosystem, producing a steady stream of articles, essays, and “salvos” promoting a constitutional conservatism that takes its cue from Vermeule while trying to situate it within the American originalist tradition.
Unlike Vermeule — whose approach is “continental” and abstract — Hammer sought to root his framework in the Aristotelian and Straussian tradition of Jaffa and the natural law theory of Hadley Arkes. He sometimes called his outlook “moral originalism” or “Manly Originalism.”
The Bostock Catalyst
Hammer (like Vermeule) was deeply offended by Justice Neil Gorsuch’s ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia (2020), in which the Supreme Court ruled that federal anti-discrimination laws protecting against sex discrimination also protect LGBTQ employees. This was precisely the outcome conservative legal originalism was supposed to prevent — but Gorsuch, a Federalist Society–vetted “originalist golden boy,” reached it through textualist reasoning.
Hammer’s reaction, echoing Josh Hawley:
“There is no escaping the takeaway of Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, in which Federalist Society-vetted ‘originalist’ golden boy Neil Gorsuch became the latest member of the ignominious list of Republican nominees at the Court to cave on a civilization-defining cultural issue. That conclusion is both stark and depressing: The conservative legal movement, with all its attendant institutions, theories, and pedagogies, has failed conservatism.”
Bostock confirmed for Hammer — and for much of the New Right — that originalism as a methodology was insufficient. What was needed was a more explicitly moralized jurisprudence.
Common Good Originalism and Related Work
Shortly after Vermeule’s original Atlantic article (2020), Hammer raised a tweaked, less radical alternative in the Claremont Institute’s American Mind — an article called “Common Good Originalism.” He went on to produce a series of articles and “salvos,” including:
- “Undoing the Court’s Supreme Transgression”
- “Who’s Afraid of the Common Good?”
- “A Better Originalism”
- “The Telos of the American Regime”
In the summer of 2021, he published a longer essay in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy (which describes itself as “the nation’s leading forum for conservative and libertarian legal scholarship”), claiming that “the state of conservative jurisprudence in America has reached a crisis point.” He endorsed “Professor Vermeule’s belief that solipsistic citizens’ ‘own perceptions of what is best for them’ are, for all intents and purposes, constitutionally irrelevant” — essentially signing on to Vermeule’s demotion of individual liberty in the American constitutional pantheon.
Popularization and Networks
Hammer helped keep the New Right constitutional movement active and growing. Roger Kimball’s cultural journal The New Criterion published a special symposium on the theme in January 2022. Hammer also explicitly emphasized “the connection between common-good originalism and national conservatism, which is more willing to prudentially wield state power to pursue a substantive vision of the good.”
He accused former Heritage Foundation vice president Kim R. Holmes of “not knowing what time it is in America” — the same charge Field uses against Robert P. George. He expressed hope that Heritage president Kevin Roberts would have “a shrewder understanding of what time it is in these late-stage United States.”
Field’s Assessment
Hammer represents the popularizing layer of the common-good constitutional movement: translating Vermeule’s dense legal theory into more accessible, Claremont-adjacent language for the broader New Right. His invocation of Jaffa and Aristotle allowed readers already steeped in West Coast Straussianism to adopt common-good thinking without fully committing to the Schmittian or integralist framework underlying Vermeule’s work.
Cross-References
- Common Good Constitutionalism — the theory Hammer popularized and adapted
- Adrian Vermeule — the theorist Hammer followed and partially modified
- National Conservatism — the movement Hammer aligned with (Edmund Burke Foundation research fellow)
- Heritage Foundation — Hammer aligned with Roberts’s Heritage against old-guard figures like Holmes
- West Coast Straussianism — the Jaffa tradition Hammer tried to reconcile with common-good thinking
- Harry V. Jaffa — intellectual lineage Hammer invoked