The role of symmetry breaking phase transitions in the Szilard engine is analyzed. It is shown that symmetry breaking is the only necessary ingredient for the engine to work. To support this idea, we show that the Ising model behaves exactly as the Szilard engine. We design a purely macroscopic Maxwell demon from an Ising model, demonstrating that a demon can operate with information about the macrostate of the system. We finally discuss some aspects of the definition of entropy and how thermodynamics should be modified to account for the variations of entropy in second-order phase transitions. (c) 2001 American Institute of Physics.