This article focuses on the architecture of Seyla Benhabib's theory in her book The Claims of Culture. The book seeks the appropriate response in democratic theory to demands for differential legal or political treatment made in the name of cultural difference. The reconciliation of culturally based claims to exceptional treatment and democratic norms of equality, reciprocity and discursive justification constitutes the work's central dialectic. On the one hand, Benhabib develops a philosophically, anthropologically and sociologically informed conception of culture and its relation to identity. This social constructivist conception of culture as the product of ongoing contestation, overlap and narration is employed to diagnose the uses and abuses of the concept of culture in contemporary political philosophy, especially to criticize overly homogenous, static and neatly bounded accounts of cultural identity. On the other, Benhabib continues to refine the account of deliberative democracy developed in earlier works, first by proposing a set of intermediary principles to govern the legitimate consideration and accommodation of cultural claims and second by seeking to vindicate the universal validity of democratic deliberation as a medium for the legitimate resolution of conflicts in cultural politics. The result is a deepened understanding of culture and a developed defense of democratic deliberation.