The discourse theory in Norman Fairclough’s Discourse and Social Change is greatly in?uential in today’s critical discourse analysis. His theoretical inspiration mainly comes from his reading and interpretation of Michel Foucault’s theory of discourse, but unfortunately there exist serious misinterpretations. This article intends to expose these misinterpretations by methodological using text analysis and reading their original works. Fairclough argues that Foucault’s ideas such as “discursively constitutive”, “any given type of discourse practice is generated out of combinations, and is defned by its relationship to others”, “power’s political nature”, “discourse’s political nature”, and “discursive nation of social change”, make a great contribution to the linguistics-orientated discourse analysis while accusing Foucault of “neglecting the linguistic texts, the practices and the resistance of power”. The article argues after analyzing Foucault’s ideas about “discourse and power” that Fairclough has not only ignored Foucault’s definition of discourse but disregarded the basic role of power in the formation of subjectivity and social reality, more pitifully, paying no attention to the resistant nature of power and its existential condition which is liberty. Fairclough as a linguist emphasizes more the role of discourse and consciously and unconsciously reduces Foucauldian discourse analysis to an “ontology of political discourse”, a structuralist framework of “quite specifc sort of discourse”. Anyway, Fairclough has made an important academic contribution to the discourse analysis.