Led by Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, and J. G. A. Pocock, scholars of colonial American history have developed the argument (often referred to as the “republican synthesis”) that the ideas, beliefs, fears, and perceptions of the “Commonwealthmen” or “Real Whigs” were “the primary elements of American politics” in the eighteenth century because they formed the political assumptions and expectations of the colonists and furnished “not merely the vocabulary but the grammar of thought, the apparatus by which the world was perceived.” The most important argument of the republican synthesis consists in the claim that the political thought of the Revolution was not primarily rooted in the Lockean tradition of liberalism but in the language of civic humanism developed in the classical and Renaissance city-states and elaborated in the dissenting literature of the English Civil War and in the opposition literature of the eighteenth-century Commonwealthmen. Though the language of republicanism shared the public stage of Revolutionary America with other idioms, the classic texts of the republican tradition provided the colonists with a highly developed discourse for understanding and protesting those actions of a government or the diseases of a state that signified in their minds the advance of corruption against virtue and of tyranny against liberty.