contracts. Even if Winroth was more outspoken than most of his predecessors, he was not a pioneer. In 1849, for example, the lawdrafting board (Lagberedningen) in its proposal of a Civil Code, had expressely rejected Schrevelius idea that the master-servant relationship belonged to family law. LikeWinroth three decades later, the board considered the relationship as a treaty between free and equal contracting parties. Winroth however entailed something new by his ambition to release labour relations from every public law component and make them into purely private law issues.This weeding out of public law components was more important than his determination not to classify the master-servant relationship as a branch of family law.Winroth’s purification of service relationships as matters of private law represented a breakthrough of a contractual way of thinking, which had been in the air for decades. In this respect there is support for Schmidt’s assertion thatWinroth presented the parties of the service relationship as autonomous persons and that their principal claims on each other originated from their “free right of determination”.According toWinroth, the “purpose” of the master-servant relationship was to complete the master’s power of action, not as Savigny had declared, to continue by mankind’s organic nature. However, the issue of Winroth as a trendsetter for Swedish20th century labour law is more complex than that.The gap between modernity, represented by Winroth, and the historical school, represented by Savigny and Schrevelius, was probably not as wide, as it might seem to be.Winroth suggested a two-step method for transplanting a selection of master-servant rules to the new free contracts of works that emerged on the labour market. First, he aimed at extending the formal application of masterservant rules from blue-collar workers who lived in the master’s family to white-collar workers who had a household of their own. Second, he suggested a method for analogously applying a selection of master-servant rules to relationships that did not fit p a r t 1 i i , c h a p t e r 4 120
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