Since ancient times, ants and their forms of social organization have served as a model and comparison for humans and their social structures. The image of ant societies, in which we reflect our own orders, is highly flexible and can serve as a template for both republican and monarchist, libertarian or totalitarian ideas of a community. In his historical study of knowledge, Niels Werber traces the fluctuating history of fascination with this comparison and examines the evidence and blind spots it produces. What is observed in ants, the findings suggest, provides answers to sociological or anthropological problems—and raises the question, across all disciplines, of what it means to be human and what the society in which one lives is.