Burke-Paine ping.
Let me throw this out as a simile: Paine's view was essentially mechanistic, similar to a lot of Utopians who feel that a model based on the correct principles must work a certain way and give a certain, predictable result. In this he is a "progressive" although that label has been twisted out of all recognition lately. Perhaps out of usefulness as well - today's progressives cheapen language by attempting to manipulate it, itself an essentially mechanistic approach to social construction. They rob it of its usefulness as well. That is another conversation.
Burke's, on the other hand, was a more organic model of society. His case is that nothing grows in a straight line, and certain practices that do not conform to a first-principles theoretical model do, in practice, confer a rather unpredictable value. Further, that to end them in conformance with mechanistic modeling might cause more harm than good because the mechanistic Enlightenment model was overly superficial. This was the source of his warning about the Terror. He died before it came to fruition but he predicted it with alarming accuracy.
What the Founders were attempting in America was, by its very nature, both mechanistic and organic. The first principles that form the bedrock of the Constitution are not purely those of Enlightenment political thought although Montesquieu looms hugely in their structure. They also built on long-established principles of English Common Law and certain home-grown practices peculiar to the sundry states. Paine was nettled occasionally at their lack of purity (by then he had moved to France and saw Burke's predictions come true), but even he had to concede that even the basic principles were not de novo, that they came from somewhere. Part of his shock at reading his friend Burke's criticism of the French Revolution was that he felt that Enlightenment principles, especially with regard to the individual's relation to the state, had been treated over-cautiously, even disrespectfully, by Burke. The result was The Rights Of Man, for which we may all be grateful - it is, compared with Burke's Reflections, a much cleaner representation of political principle and a far easier read. Burke's case was essentially "it isn't quite as easy as all that and if it goes wrong, it can go very wrong indeed." In my opinion both men were correct.
Great stuff. Thanks for the ping.