 After having successfully passed his examinations in jurisprudence, he entered the Prussian civil service in Berlin in January of 1790 and was appointed councillor (Legationsrat) soon afterwards. But he found the position and the prospects it entailed uninspiring and boring and already in May 1791 decided to take leave from the service. In June he married Karoline von Dacheröden and spent the following years on his wife’s family estates in Thuringia in the vicinity of Jena devoting his entire time and energy to his scholarly and philosophical pursuits while at the same time establishing life-long personal and intellectual ties with the poets Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. He also befriended the famed Homeric scholar Friedrich August Wolf, author of the Prolegomena ad Homerum, and debated politics and political philosophy with the statesman and Archbishop-Elector of Mainz, Karl Theodor von Dalberg. In 1792 he spelled out his views on key issues of the social and political philosophy of the period in a series of articles for the Berlinische Monatsschrift and for Schiller’s journal Neue Thalia. Among these were the “Ideas concerning constitutions occasioned by the new French Constitution” and the programmatic “What should be the Limits of the Government’s Concern for the Well Being of its Citizens?”