of private law considered the worker’s open-ended duty of obedience and loyalty as a consequence of the “nature of things” instead of being a consequence of the worker’s role as an “organic limb” of the humanity.Was it not metaphysics all the same? Probably, it did matter. The choice between referring to the law of obligations instead of family law or public law concerned the problem of giving legitimacy to general principles within an emerging legal discipline: labour law. It concerned an ideological confusion about how to treat the parties to a type of labour agreement, which until the middle of the 19th century had been unusual, but within a few decades showed an explosive development. From the liberal, democratic and “modern” point of view on private law, submission and inequality in relation to another person could be founded only on an act of voluntary consent from the person that was subordinated. According toWinroth’s teleological method, hidden terms and natural principles were not prescribed by some religious or official authorities from above, but by the free will of the contracting parties themselves. From this perspective,Winroth’s method for showing that the labour contract was furnished with a number of “natural” implicit terms was much easier to digest than the previous authors’ references to public law legislation, not to mention Savigny’s and Schrevelius’ orations on the worker’s duties as a “limb of the entire humanity’s organic context”. Winroth stated that if neither legislation nor a contract provided guidance for the interpretation of a contract, the determining source ought to be such established positions which were observable in peoples’ways of living or in the courts’ decisions.The employee’s subordinated position was the one factor that according to Winroth represented a legal prerequisite of the contract of employment as well as a consequence of the same contract. Regarding other natural consequences of the free contract of service, he, like Schrevelius in 1844, was strikingly vague. In several p a r t 1 i i , c h a p t e r 4 122
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