Empathy is making a comeback

In boardrooms, classrooms, hospitals, and living rooms around the world, a quiet revolution is underway. After decades in which empathy was dismissed as soft, sentimental, or naively impractical, it is making a comeback - not as a feel-good aspiration but as a measurable, teachable, urgently necessary human capability.

We live in an age of simultaneous crises: political polarisation that has made good-faith disagreement almost impossible; a loneliness epidemic that afflicts the most connected generation in history; and environmental challenges that demand cooperation on a scale humanity has never managed. At the root of each lies the same failure - an inability, or an unwillingness, to genuinely imagine the experience of others.

Empathy Is Making a Comeback makes the case - drawing on neuroscience, psychology, organisational research, political philosophy, and the testimony of practitioners from nurses to CEOs to mediators - that this failure is neither fixed nor inevitable. Empathy is not a personality trait you either have or don't. It is a capacity: biological, trainable, and responsive to the environments we build and the practices we cultivate.