Why was De Cive published before De Corpore and De Homine?

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English philosopher Thomas Hobbes — Thomas Hobbes Thomas Hobbes, detail of an oil painting by John Michael Wright; in the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Although De Cive (1642) was intended to be the final part of Thomas Hobbes’s philosophical system, it was published before De Corpore (1655) and De Homine (1658) for two primary reasons:

Timeliness: The political turmoil occurring in England at the time made the message of De Cive particularly urgent and relevant.1
Accessibility: The doctrine presented in De Cive was intelligible to readers even without the natural-scientific preliminaries that were to be established in the other two works of his trilogy.1

While De Corpore and De Homine were designed to arrange natural science, psychology, and politics into a logical hierarchy, the pressing nature of the English political crisis necessitated the earlier release of his political philosophy.1