Like all ranking charts, the choices are bound to be controversial. But I can assure you that a very careful formula has been used to make the selection. To find themselves on this exclusive list, a person has to display a unique combination of traits: they must have a highly developed capacity to step into the shoes of other people; their empathising must have had a major social impact; it should have required acts of personal courage; and finally, it must provide inspiration for others.

So, let’s meet our empathetic wunderkids, in reverse order:

#5. Hilary Swank

Hilary Swank playing Brandon Teena in the 1999 film Boys Don't Cry.

Coming in at number five is Hollywood actress Hilary Swank. She gains her coveted place for her Oscar-winning role in the 1999 film Boys Don’t Cry, which is based on the real-life story of Brandon Teena, a transgendered man who was raped and murdered by his male friends after they found out that he had female genitalia. In preparing for the part, Swank cut off her hair, dressed up in her husband’s clothes, put on a cowboy hat, and ventured out onto the streets of New York for a month to see if she could pass for a young man, just as Brandon Teena had done. Describing her adventure, she said, ‘I got to see what it’s like for a transgender person, or a person with a sexual identity crisis, or a lesbian or a gay person, and the daily harassment you can get…it’s a scary place to be, to feel not understood’. Swank’s brilliant portrayal of Brandon Teena helped raise the political profile of the struggles faced by transgendered people, and also inspired her to become a campaigner on gay, lesbian and transgender issues, and a spokesperson for the Harvey Milk School in New York.

Find out more: Watch the film Boys Don’t Cry and visit the website of the Harvey Milk School.

#4. George Orwell

George Orwell in 1946, pushing his adopted son Richard through the streets of Islington, North London.

How could you have an Empathy Top Five without putting George Orwell on the list? He earned his empathy spurs in the 1920s while working as a colonial police officer in Burma. Orwell was disgusted at the brutality of colonialism which he witnessed first-hand, and vowed on his return to Britain to step into the shoes of everyday working people and discover what their lives were really like. ‘I felt that I had got to escape not merely from imperialism but from every form of man’s dominion over other man’, he said. ‘I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed; to be one of them and on their side against the tyrants.’ That’s when he decided to dress up as a tramp and live amongst beggars and vagabonds on the streets of East London, a time of his life described in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). With this book, together with his political reportage, Orwell shone the spotlight on neglected and marginalised communities in British society like almost no other writer in the twentieth century.

Find out more: Read Down and Out in Paris and London, and Orwell’s short essay ‘Down the Mine’.

#3. Harriet Beecher Stowe

Charley, killed by cholera in 1849.

The American novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe may be history’s most forgotten empathist. The great issue of her age was slavery, and the brutal treatment of slaves on the cotton plantations in the south of the United States. In 1852 she published her story Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was effectively a political tract against slavery. It was a publishing sensation, selling four million copies within a decade. The book helped transform the worldview of a whole generation, showing them the horrors of slavery up close, and thereby encouraging the rebellion against slavery and its proponents that eventually played itself out in the American Civil War. Beecher Stowe was inspired to write the book following the tragic death of her eighteen-month-old son Charley in the Cincinnati cholera epidemic of 1849. This event ripped her open into empathy for black women whose children were being sold into slavery: ‘It was at his bed, and at his grave, that I learnt what a poor slave mother may feel when her child is torn away from her.’

Find out more: Read the fascinating biography Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life by Joan Hedrick.

#2. Mahatma Gandhi

Mahatma Gandhi taking a rest from spinning cloth in 1946. He is one of the few political figures in history able to make his own underwear.

I realise this may create gasps of incredulity, but the great master of empathy Mahatma Gandhi only comes in at second place. After his return to India from South Africa in 1915, Gandhi decided that if he was going to campaign for Indian independence from British rule, he would need to experience what life was really like for the poorest people in the country. So he threw away his fancy barrister’s suit and collar, wrapped himself in a dhoti or loincloth, and established the Sabamarti Ashram, where he lived from 1917 to 1930. Ashram life was about stepping into the shoes of peasant farmers. He and his followers grew their own food, spun their own cloth, and cleaned out the latrines – a job usually relegated to the Untouchable (Dalit) caste. Gandhi’s deep empathetic instinct also took him across religious boundaries. He was appalled by the violence between Hindus and Muslims, and fervently opposed the creation of a separate Muslim state. A devout Hindu himself, he once declared to a group of Hindu nationalists: ‘I am a Muslim! And a Hindu, and a Christian and a Jew – and so are all of you.’ These words, which still resonate today, rank amongst the greatest empathetic statements of all time.

Find out more: There’s no better starting place than Richard Attenborough’s epic film Gandhi. Also try Gandhi’s An Autobiography – or The Story of My Experiments with Truth.

#1. Claiborne Paul Ellis

C.P. Ellis, the former Ku Klux Klan leader, with his friend Ann Atwater.

Top of our empathy poll is…C.P. Ellis. ‘Who?’, you are bound to ask. C.P. Ellis was born into a poor white family in Durham, North Carolina, in 1927. Finding it hard to make ends meet working in a garage and believing blacks were the cause of all his troubles, he followed his father’s footsteps and joined the Ku Klux Klan, eventually rising to the top position of Exalted Cyclops of the Durham chapter of the KKK. The turning point in his life came in 1971, when he was invited to a ten-day community meeting to help solve racial tensions in schools. C.P.Ellis was chosen to head the race committee jointly with a local black activist who he hated, named Ann Atwater. But working with her completely exploded his prejudices about African Americans. He saw that she shared the same problems of poverty as his own and that their real enemies were white businessmen and politicians who kept their wages low and pitted poor blacks and whites against one another. ‘I was beginning to look at a black person, shake hands with him, and see him as a human being,’ he recalled of his experience on the committee. ‘Somethin’ was happening to me. It was almost like bein’ born again.’ On the final night of the community meeting, he stood at the microphone in front of a thousand people and tore up his Klan membership card. C.P. Ellis later became a famed civil rights campaigner and labour organiser for a union whose membership was seventy per cent black. He and Ann remained friends for the rest of their lives.

Find out more: Read the moving interview with C.P. Ellis by the oral historian Studs Terkel in his book, American Dreams: Lost and Found. You can also find an extract here.

I imagine you have your own empathetic heroines and heroes, so I invite you to leave a comment revealing to the world your personal choices of people who deserve a place in the Empathy Hall of Fame.

Colin Ward (1924-2010), the gentlest anarchist of them all.

Colin Ward was one the greatest anarchist thinkers of the past half century and a pioneering social historian. He died earlier this month at the age of eighty-five, leaving a legacy of over thirty books and a huge following of activists, educators and writers – amongst them myself – who were inspired by his approach to radical social change, which always favoured practical, grass-roots action over utopian dreamings of revolution. The outpouring of obituaries in The Guardian and elsewhere are testimony to his influence.

I first came across his work in 1997 in the anarchist newspaper Freedom, which I had started reading as an antidote to the mainstream papers which were obsessed with the general election of that year. I quickly became addicted to his books, from the classic Anarchy in Action (1973) to more quirky titles like Goodnight Campers! The History of the British Holiday Camp (1986). Later I became friends with Colin and his wife Harriet (herself a formidable thinker and writer) and for a decade made regular trips to stay with them in Suffolk. Colin was a gentle man and a wonderful storyteller. He had a boyish chuckle, a mischievous glint in his eye, and would often break out into song while munching on a sausage, drawing on his astonishing memory – which unfortunately faded in his last years – to recollect lyrics from his 1930s Essex childhood. It is no wonder that his son and two step-sons all ended up as musicians.

Although he developed an international reputation and was invited to speak all over the world, Colin rarely took the opportunity to travel abroad. Instead one of the highlights of his week was a bus trip (he couldn’t drive) from his rural home to the town of Ipswich, where he would go to the cinema with Harriet and raid the local library, of which he must have been their most fanatical user. Back at home, when he wasn’t reading, he would spend most of his time clattering away on his old typewriter knocking out yet another Colin Ward book or diligently responding to correspondence from Korean anarchists, Norwegian allotment experts and others amongst his global following.

What I really loved about Colin was his capacity to see the good in people. He didn’t expend his energy attacking those whose views he did not share, and could usually find a kind word for them. Of the notoriously prickly American anarchist Murray Bookchin, he once said, ‘I am quite happy that we only meet every fifteen years or so, because we enquire about health and family rather than about those things which might unite or divide us’. That was about as far as Colin could go in terms of personal criticism, and he made a point of avoiding the infighting within the anarchist movement.

My favourite story about him – which I may have unconsciously embellished over the years – concerns his period as a teacher of the new-fangled subject of Liberal Studies at Wandsworth Technical College in South London during the 1960s. Most of his students were young apprentices in the building trade, and when he walked in to teach his first class he asked them what it was they wanted to learn – what difficulties did they face in their lives that he could really help them with? It turned out that their greatest concern was with lack of sleep. So Colin duly crammed his brain full of the scholarly literature on sleep and set about teaching a term of classes on the art of sleeping. It is a story that has always stayed with me as a teacher, the ultimate example of making an effort to meet your students’ needs.

For most people the typical image of an anarchist is a bomb-throwing Russian from the nineteenth century or a black-masked youth at one of today’s anti-capitalist demonstrations. Colin was neither. He came from a different anarchist tradition, one which saw social change emerging not from violence and revolution, but from expanding social cooperation and mutual aid in everyday life. His writings celebrated worker cooperatives, tenant housing associations, allotment holders, children’s adventure playgrounds, Friendly Societies and organisations like the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. This is where he saw ‘anarchy in action’ – people organising themselves on a voluntary, non-hierarchical and decentralised basis –  a social model reflecting the anarchism of one of Colin’s major influences, the Russian writer and geographer Peter Kropotkin. Colin believed that an anarchist society was not an imagined future state, but rather something that existed in the here and now, all around us. It was a latent force, ‘like a seed beneath the snow’ as he used to say, that had the power to push back the boundaries of the centralised state and the capitalist system.

Colin was fond of quoting the early-twentieth century German anarchist Gustav Landauer, who wrote:

‘The state is not something which can be destroyed by a revolution, but is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently.’

Here was the idea that social change was not about new laws, governments, or policies, but about creating a revolution of human relationships from the bottom up, and shifting the way individuals treated one another. It was an approach that had a profound impact on my own thinking, drawing me away from my early interest in traditional party politics and state power (I used to be a university politics lecturer) and towards developing my ideas about empathy as a force for social change. Colin’s writings on the social philosophy of Martin Buber in his book Influences (1991) introduced me to another thinker who has deeply shaped my beliefs about the power of empathy.

Outside anarchist circles, Colin had a major impact as a social and oral historian, taking his readers into unexpected landscapes to hear voices that mainstream historians generally ignored. His book The Allotment: Its Landscape and Culture (written with David Crouch, 1988) showed vegetable gardeners as ingenious improvisers, while The Child in the City (1978) revealed the extraordinary creativity of kids who played in urban slums. One of his last books, Cotters and Squatters (2002), which chronicled the history of squatting in Britain since the seventeenth century, was typical of his work, bringing to life a whole social subculture about which few people have any knowledge. Part of what made Colin’s books so compelling was not only the extraordinary range and originality of the subject matter, but also his conversational style and accessible prose: he was highly allergic to theoretical and academic jargon. Despite these virtues, he found it hard to persuade mainstream publishers to take interest in his books, making it difficult for him to eke out a living as a writer – although he managed to achieve an underground cult status, with his fans including the likes of George Monbiot, Richard Maybe and Roger Deakin.

Colin had an extreme distaste for nationalist, religious or political separatism. He rejected the ideologies and simplistic patriotisms that led people to kill one another. In 1942, as a sixteen-year-old during the darkest days of the Second World War, he made a point of copying out the following lines written by the columnist Bill Connor in the Daily Mirror:

‘Our children are guarded from diphtheria by what a Japanese and a German did. They are saved from smallpox by an Englishman’s work. They are saved from rabies because of a Frenchman. From birth to death they are surrounded by an invisible host – the spirits of men who never served a lesser loyalty than the welfare of mankind.’

While Colin cherished this humanising quote as central to his own vision of the world, he gradually came to inhabit its very lines himself. Colin Ward is now part of that invisible host surrounding our lives, whose work will keep quietly shaping human welfare and creating the revolution of human relationships that we so desperately need.

If you are new to Colin Ward’s writing and want to know where to start, you could begin with his explicitly anarchist works such as Anarchy in Action or Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction (part of the Oxford University Press series). Alternatively you could try his more general books, such as The Allotment: It’s Landscape and Culture (with David Crouch) or The Child in the City. A more complete list of writings appears at Wikipedia, including Ken Worpole’s great edited book Richer Futures: Fashioning a New Politics, containing essays by people across a range of fields influenced by Colin Ward’s ideas.

I believe that empathy can help us escape from the narrow confines of our own existence and guide us towards more adventurous and fulfilling lives. Empathy is also a radical tool for social transformation that has the potential to bring about change not through new laws, policies or institutions, but through a revolution of human relationships. Barack Obama has said the most fundamental problem in modern society is ‘the empathy deficit’. Harnessing the transformative power of empathy is the great challenge of the twenty-first century.

This weekly blog will contain my own thoughts on empathy, the stories of empathetic adventurers, interviews with key empathy activists and thinkers, and act as a global portal for empathy news from around the world. I also hope it becomes a place where people can share their personal experiences of looking at life through they eyes of others.

I would like to launch this blog with a story that I hope you find as inspiring as I do.

The Locket

‘It was a sight I will never be able to forget, and it changed my life completely,’ remembers Rami Elchanan, an Israeli graphic designer. On a Thursday afternoon in September 1997, his daughter Smadar, a vivacious fourteen-year-old who loved modern dance and dreamed of becoming a doctor, had gone shopping for new school books with friends on Ben Yehuda Street in West Jerusalem. At three o’clock Rami heard news reports on his car radio of a Palestinian suicide bombing nearby that had injured hundreds and left several people dead. He immediately went looking for his daughter, frantically running from street to street, from hospital to hospital. Finally he found her. Smadar’s body was laid out in a morgue.

Rami’s immediate reaction was rage. ‘When someone murders your little daughter, the one and only thing you have in your head is unlimited anger and an urge for revenge that is stronger than death.’ Gradually the anger subsided and his life became enveloped by an unbearable grief for the loss of his child. A year after the bombing Rami was invited to a meeting of the Parents Circle – also known as the Bereaved Families Forum – which brings together Israelis and Palestinians whose family members have been killed in the conflict. Initially reluctant and sceptical about the usefulness of such an organisation, he eventually agreed to take part. He watched with detachment as other Israeli families began to arrive. And then he witnessed something extraordinary. ‘I saw Arabs getting off the buses, bereaved Palestinian families: men, women, children, coming towards me, greeting me, hugging me and crying with me. I distinctly remember a respectable elderly woman dressed in black from tip to toe and on her breast a locket with a picture of a kid, about six years old. A singer sang in Hebrew and Arabic, and suddenly I was hit by lightning. I can’t explain the change I underwent at that moment.’

Until then Rami, who was forty-seven at the time, had never shaken hands with a Palestinian, let alone embraced one. The meeting, for him, was a new beginning. He realised that there were Palestinians who had suffered the same sorrows as him and his family. They were united by a shared experience that allowed them to understand one another’s lives. ‘What connects us is the pain,’ he says. ‘Our blood is the same red colour, our suffering is identical, and all of us have the exact same bitter tears.’ Through his involvement with the Bereaved Families Forum, Rami was able to humanise the enemy, to see that Palestinians, not just Israelis, were victims of the conflict. ‘I had gone through a long process of demonizing them,’ he admits. ’By meeting the Palestinian bereaved families, I saw Palestinians as human beings, not caricatures in newspapers or articles or history items, but real people, crying with me. That was my turning point.’

Rami Elchanan (far right) with Palestinian members of the Bereaved Families Forum, Mazen Faraj, Fadi Abu Awwad and Aziz Abu Sarah.

Since that first meeting Rami has dedicated himself to the cause of Israeli -Palestinian reconciliation and the pioneering work of the Bereaved Families Forum, whose membership comprises over five hundred families. He took part in a unique project where bereaved Israelis travelled to a hospital in Ramallah and donated blood for Palestinian victims, while bereaved Palestinian families went to Jerusalem and donated blood to the Israeli Red Cross. Another initiative, called ‘Hello Peace’, is an unusual form of answering service. You dial a freephone number and if you are Israeli you can speak with a Palestinian, and if you are Palestinian you talk to an Israeli. Since it began in 2002, there have been over a million conversations between the two sides. While some calls begin as screaming matches, others have led to lasting friendships.

Rami Elchanan, the son of an Auschwitz survivor, is regularly abused and ridiculed in Israeli circles for fraternising with the relatives of suicide bombers. But he knows that there is no hope of ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without mutual understanding, without conversations between strangers that erode the distance of ignorance: ‘We must be prepared to listen to ‘the other’. Because if we will not listen to the other’s story we won’t be able to understand the source of their pain and we should not expect the other to understand our own.’